Empathy is a fundamental quality that nursing staff should possess, but the empathy ability of nursing students in China is currently at an intermediate level and requires improvement. This study aimed to explore teaching methods for nursing humanistic education, that can improve the empathy ability of nursing students and cultivate high-quality nursing talents. This study employed narrative education and experiential teaching methods to develop empathic competence in teaching pediatric nursing courses. The empathic ability of nursing students was measured using the JSPE-NS scale before and after teaching and was analyzed to refine the teaching reflection theme words. After teaching, nursing students scored higher on the total empathy scale, perspective-taking dimension, and emotional care dimension than before teaching, with statistically significant differences (p < 0.05). Five themes were extracted from the teaching reflection, including emotional empathy, pediatric nursing skills, gratitude to parents, reverence for life, and course experience. The results show that the combination of narrative education and experiential teaching methods applied to pediatric nursing courses effectively improved nursing students' empathy, strengthened their identification with the nursing profession, and promoted the teaching reform of humanistic education in nursing courses. The combination of narrative education and experiential teaching methods can improve the empathic ability of nursing students. This approach is suitable for integrating humanistic education into nursing professional courses and provides a feasible idea for developing humanistic qualities in nurses.