Empathy is one of the most important tools that parents have in helping us to connect with as well as manage our children. But it is also a tool that is frequently under-utilized and/or misunderstood.
What is empathy?
Empathy involves understanding another’s feelings. It is related to, but different from compassion, sympathy, and/or pity. Being empathic involves putting oneself in another’s shoes and seeing an issue from the other person’s point of view – even if their thoughts and feelings are different from what you would feel in the same situation. It does not automatically involve giving someone their way and/or excusing misbehavior.
What does empathy look like?
Empathy can take a lot of different forms, but one component is good listening. While this sounds easy, in fact good listening is often quite difficult to do. Good listening that fosters connection with another’s feelings means listening with full attention and holding off on blame, judgment and/or offering solutions. Listening with full attention also means stopping whatever else you are doing, making eye contact, and allowing the other person to talk without much interruption.
Empathy also involves an expression back to the other person that indicates that you understand. Interestingly, saying “I understand” often does not do the trick. A common recommendation with regard to communicating understanding is to name the feeling (or general feeling state) that the other person seems to be having. It also can help to tie the feeling to the specific experience that is being described. For example: You seem angry. Wow, that made you mad. You are furious! You hate that ___ happened. You seem sad. It hurt your feelings that ____. You didn’t like it when ____. You are really proud of yourself. You feel good that you ____. It made you feel grown up when ____. You really care about ____. You are excited! You were embarrassed when _____. You are really frustrated that ____.
Why use empathy?
Broadly speaking, communicating understanding of our children’s feelings promotes healthy and positive social and emotional development. Giving our children a vocabulary for their internal states is an important tool in helping them along the road to understanding themselves and coping with difficult experiences. It also helps teach them perspective-taking and facilitates their ability to relate well to others. Finally, empathy helps to foster positive parent-child relationships, which is one of the strongest predictors of good outcomes for children.
On a more practical level, however, empathy can be a very important tool for managing our children’s behavior. It can help de-escalate emotional outbursts and temper tantrums, re-direct children’s behavior, and decrease parent-child conflict.
Other resources
An excellent book about how to use empathy to improve parent-child relationships and increase child compliance is How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.
Kathleen McElhaney
Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Posted 10-11-2010