The Parent Child Relationship - Why Empathy Is An Absolute Must, Especially For Gentle Parents — Peaceful Living with Miranda

Being an empathetic parent is a must for building a healthy parent child relationship - and it has the power to change so much of your life with your children.

Firstly, a huge welcome from me - I’m Miranda, and Peaceful Living with Miranda is my business and blog. I’m a mum of 3 kiddos, experienced teacher, women’s emotional health coach and gentle parenting consultant. As well as coaching and blogging on gentle parenting & anything that helps you as a mum with stress relief & emotional healing, I create digital products and write books that help women with their own emotional health and with parenting their children - because the two go hand in hand. Find out more about what I offer on my Emotional Health Bookings page here.

In this post, I’m sharing why empathy is so important to the parent child relationship - and why you cannot be an effective gentle parent without it.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission, at no cost to you. Thanks for supporting my blog - I hope you find it helpful!

The Parent child relationship - why empathy is an absolute must, especially for gentle parents

What is empathy - and how is it different to sympathy?

Empathy describes the ability to see things from another person’s point of view. It means we can appreciate what it is like for the person we are being empathetic towards. Sympathy, on the other hand, means feeling sorry for the person from our point of view, without necessarily seeking to understand what it is like to actually be in their situation.

If you are a gentle parent or positive parent, or even a new mum just formulating how you want to go about the serious-but-amazing business of parenting your little one/s, you are already invested in being a parent your child can identify with. One who creates that atmosphere and environment of psychological and emotional safety, so they can live, learn, make mistakes and learn some more, and feel safe enough to have big emotions but know you won’t let them get carried away on the tide!

Sounds great, doesn’t it? It is. But, it’s a lot of hard work as a mum, too! That’s why empathy is so important - and here’s why.

Want to understand your emotional three year old better - and give them some real, on-the-ground tips for building emotional regulation? Emotionally Equipped Child simple course for mums >>

3 reasons empathy is so important for the parent child relationship

1: Empathy helps us understand.

Part of building a healthy parent child relationship involves exactly what we have been talking about in this post already - creating understanding.

Parenting involves many, many lovely and heartwarming moments - but it is also sometimes very hard to manage our own emotional outbursts, especially if our own inner child has been hurt, and is carrying wounds from our lives or childhood ourselves. (This is often something that comes out as a parent, anyway - we don’t often know about how to manage these things in a healthy way, until we have to teach our own kids, or put ourselves through their big feelings and be ‘the adult’ there!)

When we are frustrated with our own child, we can become more focused on ‘calming’ them down, or making them be more quiet or ‘convenient’ to us - rather than actually helping them move through their big feelings, and build their resilience and skillset.

Empathy is a major key to helping us do this - and it helps build the parent child relationship so much, because when we take a breath and spend time with our child, we are able to actually see things from their point of view, what their needs actually are, and how we can help them, and usually the real peace will return much more quickly than if we forced it, anyway.

Find out more about the Finding Peace membership right here - and have a real professional in the wings and the opportunity of consistent virtual support as you navigate healing/mum life/and the kids’ wellbeing!

2: it helps our child know we are actually on their side

One thing that happens as our kids grow, is that they start to have their own opinions. This is completely normal - imagine if you still only held your parents opinions - but can be challenging as we learn what to let go of, and what is really important to stick to.

For instance, if your child wants to wear blue or green instead of pink all the time, when they are 3 - start grabbing them some cute green or blue clothes when you can. Why not? Much like in any other relationship, it shows we can listen, learn and compromise sometimes.

However, if your child wants to hit everyone in the house with a stick - it’s a no-go, right? But what do we do when our child wants to do this, regardless of us telling them not to? (You would be so surprised how many people just let their child do things like this.)

Enter the empathetic, caring mum who says something like: ‘I know you want to hit something, and that’s fine. We only hit a ball - with a bat. Let’s do that - but you can’t hit other people. Let’s go organise this ball!’

A gigantic bonus of being empathetic is that when we can show empathy to our child, we often simultaneously stop many of the power struggles we can face with our kids. It’s much easier to say ‘Ok, Mama’, when they feel heard and have an alternative option, which you may even be helping put in place for them now!

Empathy is understanding. But, it doesn’t ignore simple boundaries and limits, either. It builds the parent child relationship by creating a sense of connection between you and your child, which helps them feel understood, and consequently helps them listen to you because they feel fairly heard. Note I didn’t say always listen - because kids, in fact, are kids.

**Boundaries with Kids Book**

Join Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, authors of the New York Times bestseller Boundaries, as they share the research and guidance you need to raise your kids to take responsibility for their actions, attitudes, and emotions. What Boundaries has done for adult relationships, Boundaries with Kids will do for you and your family.
You'll learn how to:
Define appropriate boundaries and consequences for your kids
Set limits and still be a loving parent
Bring balance to an out-of-control family life
Apply the ten laws of boundaries to your parenting
Understand the six steps to implementing boundaries in your home
AUS Amazon link
US Amazon link

3: Empathy Creates a safer emotional environment for our child.

What is one of the most important, earliest and basic psychological factors we feel as a child? Safety.

How do kids feel safe? With parents who will do anything to care for them, to hold them, to feed them and nurture them. Everyone, with zero exceptions, needed that as a child, and if your own parent did not provide this enough, you very possibly have wounds around this exact issue.

Although some people may have thought the opposite years ago, this doesn’t just mean physical comfort, or having your physical needs for food and shelter met. It means emotional love, care and gentleness, too. It means allowing your child to be themselves, and accepting them for who they are - without trying to change their personality. Of course kids need guiding, teaching and preparing as they grow - you will never hear me say kids don’t need discipline, structure and rules - but one thing our kids need is to feel like you back them up, 100%.

Empathy is a giant part of this. For instance, when your child is having a stressed, emotional meltdown because she can’t find her shoes, it’s not helpful to tell her off, as much as we’ve all done that before! It is more helpful to remember what it is like to feel like that, and you’ll realise that condemnation and more stress in that moment, is the last thing she needs, is unhelpful for the parent child relationship, and also will likely result in an even lower ability to find the shoes!

Child keep wetting the bed? Here are a few helpful solutions to choose from >>

Empathy is absolutely essential for the parent child relationship to thrive.

In fact, empathy is essential for any relationship to thrive, between parent and child, husband and wife or any partnership. Even the best dog trainers have empathy for their animals and a mutual respect, too!

When you feel like you are struggling to get through to your child, give you both an emotional break and then come back with some authentic empathy - looking for actually how they feel, and what they are really needing from the situation. Behind every behaviour is a need - whether it’s a need for connection, for self-fulfillment, boredom, or even love. Being an effective gentle parent is really all about meeting these needs as much as we can as mums - and remembering that actually we aren’t meant to fill everything for our child, either, as they grow. Some is up to us - some is up to God - and some is up to them to seek and find.

Do you want to listen to this on the podcast? Listen to The Mum Wellbeing Podcast here!