All children are empathic. And all children must abandon empathy because of the pretense of their parents and care-givers.
Of course, some people are empaths… and they must learn suppression, avoidance, going unconscious for long periods of times if they want to remain sane.
Let me explain.
I grew up with two Holocaust survivor parents. They met in one of those camps where the Nazis collected the Jews before they transported them to a concentration camp.
Later my father impregnated my mother… and shortly after the boy was born, they got married.
My father was insensitive, and my mother didn’t love him. Then she got pregnant with me, and she put all her dislike of my father onto me.
According to some psychologists, I suffered from double bind: i.e. my mother’s feelings and behavior told two different stories. Impossible to reconcile, I went to the suppression route.