One of the key emotional components is to teach a child and enrich him with empathy, with the ability to feel and understand oneself with others. Empathy serves as a very important motivator for prosocial, altruistic behavior, for actions that contribute to the success of another person without any rewards in return. Encouraging the development of imagination during childhood and adolescence leads to stimulation of empathy. Imagination is a cognitive aspect of empathy. Cognitive empathy is a knowledge of how the other person feels and what he might think, emotional empathy is the physical alignment with the inner world of a person's feelings and empathic care, with knowledge and feeling, stimulates action (Goleman, 2007). A positive parenting environment, acceptance, involvement and rational control protect children from the negative impact of family and environmental stress. Stress is a mental, emotional or physical factor that causes physical or psychological tension. Coping with stress can be focused on problem-solving which refers to taking action, and emotional-focused coping with evasive, passive emotion-control strategies (distraction, social retreat, imagination). This paper investigated the relationship between stressful family situations and empathy of children in schools, which are in the extended professional program. Gender and age differences in empathy and imagination were also studied, the difference in estimated stress among students who did and also ones who did not experience a particularly stressful event and the gender difference in the frequency of experiencing stressful events. The results have shown that girls are more empathetic and prone to greater imagination, unlike boys, and that students who have not experienced certain stressful events have assessed them more stressful than the students who experienced these events. Also, the results showed no gender differences in the frequency of stressful events. The obtained results can be explained by the child’s upbringing and traditional gender roles in society of women and men. Those are adolescents with specific life circumstances, who are not yet sufficiently cognitively developed. They have different experiences and ability to perceive and solve individual problems.