empathic parenting – Lolo Lesser

When we desire a specific new action, we describe it in detail giving our child the experience of how it will be, what to expect, avoiding any surprises if possible.

We celebrate small steps giving meaningful specific praise, and positive encouragement-

“Your jacket is closer to the hook today. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be even closer.”

“You are too nice to talk to your little sister that way.”

“You ate all your broccoli – you’re going to grow really strong.”

Joy and Happiness are the milk of human interaction, the pleasure of a secure attachment, reinforced with meaningful rituals, celebration, and love- built upon in a lifetime of living. –

We all make mistakes, and that is the fact of it. Sometimes the mistake ends up being more of a blessing than if it had turned out the way we’d wished. All those mistakes are opportunities for empathy to heal us. Telling the truth can be so liberating. At any age, reinforcing that family attachment with empathic communication, understanding, and reconciliation is possible.

In Infancy to age 5, physical contact of hugging and touch is foremost in creating that secure joy and attachment bond. But remember, touch is still needed at all the other older stages, in smaller doses perhaps, and in other guises. If you can establish some home rituals around mealtimes, prayers or affirmations, table manners, and bedtimes, make sure they are meaningful and you are all able to express feelings, your family identity, and a connection to something bigger (nature, the higher self, spiritual feelings, world peace are all ideas that you can use). Holidays can provide opportunities for fun rituals that are special just to your family, or the two of you. Unleash your creativity to find the things that bond you, and be consistent. Starting Sunday evening (or any evening) family gatherings as soon as possible can consolidate family strengths for a lifetime.

With aged 5-12 year old children, their developing autonomy requires less touch and parents would be wise to insure that hugs and holding is not waylaid completely in the rush of activities and peer fun that characterize this age. Reminders of “how we do things” in our family, are important touchstones for closeness to be maintained. This is the age when children develop true empathy and values, with reason and logic helping them to understand how to truly be an Empatharian out in the world.

But they make loads of mistakes and Reframing those mistakes as progress on a continuum of learning, encourages positive thinking about accomplishments. And bravery to try. Chores are important at every age, but especially at this age, children feel good about contributing to the family functioning. While having a share of the family income might be fair enough, rewarding for specific chores within the regular set of expectations can be counter-productive to team building.

To Help Behavior Change, a parent can give positively skewed feedback and encouragement, or the environment provides feedback directly. Praise works best when specific to a specific situation, in the here and now. By providing a slightly prejudiced viewpoint to the positive, a parent can train the child’s mind to do the same: amplifying progress, celebrating tiny changes as positives, and reframing a failure into “a good effort”. Effort can always be celebrated, and the child makes progress with continued right effort being encouraged.

The next blog post will be about Adolescence and some hacks for parenting adolescents. Teens are definitely challenging, but then so are 2 year olds! And 6 year olds! If you survived this long, you will survive. Rest easy in that till tomorrow!

We parent our children so that they can survive and thrive in this world, so that they can carry forward the legacy and honor of our forebears, and so that they can make a positive difference in the future world for our grandchildren and great grandchildren. We want our children to stand on our shoulders to reach what we could not.

In the past, conformity and compliance were required so that factory jobs could be filled. Now the world is an increasingly insecure place and independence, creativity, and bravery are more valued assets in adulthood. Our children might be mutating towards this new paradigm, with the increasing numbers of Autism and ADD/ ADHD being reported. We as parents want to help our children achieve success, and negotiating a peaceful family life can be more challenging than ever before.

Boundaries and resistance help our children to develop good habits and courtesy, impulse control and restraint, the ability to delay gratification, the ability to work hard and meet resistance, and resiliency to handle disappointments. This is the basis of true self-esteem, self-discipline, and empathy for others. It’s harder in the short term to be consistent with this but in the long term, the goals of our parenting are better achieved, and our efforts are rewarded.

In the long long term, it’s all a toss up though. Was all that effort worth it?

As a single parent after divorcing my son’s absentee father, my son has been my everything. To counteract the over focus, we shared our home with goldfish, cats, puppies, dogs, housemates, and occasionally friends. I started and facilitated a single parent group, and did outings with them, became friends with the children, never fell in love, never got re-married. My son was difficult all through his childhood, from babyhood on: demanding, willful, oppositional, and often defiant. He was also very loving, sweet, self-directed, and helpful at times.

His father and I went in different directions, to the point where my son expressed dismay that we’d ever been married. I was the vegetarian, hippy, peacenik, and his father was the hamburger/fries, straight, social-climbing, Republican. My son worshiped his father, and wanted to be just like him. At eighteen he moved in with his father, and reality set in. His father barely paid attention to him, except to yell at him.

I believe now that my son’s heart was broken then, and his obsession with skating and drugs began to snowball. To me, I saw a healthy brotherhood of skillful wheel balletists, an alternative family with drugs and alcohol at bay so that they could excel at their sport. My son was a part of the skater brotherhood, a star, winning contests, traveling all over the world, sponsored. He was an agile dedicated skater whose sport helped him overcome the ADD that had plagued him, for which he’d refused medication. He was in school, making skate films I thought brilliant, and seemed to have everything going for him. He moved into the city with some friends, bought a car, came to visit on holidays. He shared with me how he now realized that his father was a selfish asshole.

Then he injured his ankle really badly; every tendon in his ankle was broken. Two surgeries later, with 2 pins in his ankle, he was living with a girlfriend in San Francisco, and he implored me not to visit. It was only a few months later when his physician called me in London, where I was caring for my aging mother, that I realized things had changed forever for him. He was now homeless, jobless, and carless. Still proclaiming he was “fine”, I nevertheless booked a trip to San Francisco. My son was amazing, resilient, positive, but he needed my help.

Read my next blog post about Strengthening the Will of the Child, and hear how it turned out for this challenged child.

Tag: empathic parenting

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