Research on empathic development, though extensive, has largely overlooked two vital facets of flexible empathic responding—multideterminism (which is elicited in response to various cues) and context dependence (i.e., empathic responding that can be regulated depending on contextual factors). Within a dual‐process account of empathic responding (in which both bottom‐up and top‐down processes contribute), such flexible empathic responding relies heavily on top‐down processes. Yet most developmental research has not systematically considered the role of top‐down processes in bringing about multidetermined and context‐dependent empathic responding; as such, it provides a narrow view of early empathic responding. Recent research has begun to fill these gaps and suggests that top‐down processes are involved even in early flexible empathic responding. But much more work is needed, particularly on developmental mechanisms and the development of top‐down processes, to understand fully the origins of flexible concern.