Empathy cheat

If you missed the last post on the importance of empathy, "Empathy helps our kids place the blame where it belongs," read it first.

We know using empathy when our kids are experiencing consequences preserves our relationship and ups the chances of our kids learning from their mistakes.

But what about those times we don’t feel empathetic?

What about when one of our kids is already on our very last nerve and then she does something completely defiant?

What about when our kids are fighting over the same dumb toy for the fifteenth time and we would rather smash the toy into pieces than express empathy!?

That’s why we have a little cheat to keep things simple. We just need to learn one empathetic statement, and we can use it over and over again.

When we’re just not feeling the empathy, we don’t have to draw from our already spent resources and come up with something empathetic. We will already know the statement we can use.

There are a lot of choices about what that statement can be:

What a bummer…

Oh, no…

Oh, honey…

This is so sad…

We want to pick one that will sound natural coming from us. We also want to pick one that will sound genuinely empathetic, not frustrated or sarcastic.

My personal favorite is “This is so sad…” I like it because it’s hard to say with sarcasm (“What a bummer…” could come out of my mouth dripping with sarcasm if I were in a certain mood). It’s also nice because it reminds me, even when the situation is super frustrating or annoying for me, that it really is sad for the kid.

We want to memorize the empathetic statement so that we have it when we need it. But, how do we do this? We can stick some post-it’s around, especially if our kids don’t read. If they do read, we may want to be more discrete and only put the post-it’s places only we’ll see them, like our sock drawer, coffee grinder, or maybe as a book mark. Some people use it as the home screen on their phone. However you decide to remind yourself, you want to see it a lot, so the statement is at the tip of our tongue.

Using the empathetic statement when we need to set a limit or our kids need a consequence will express empathy to our kids, but over the years I’ve noticed that the empathy I give often boomerangs right back at me. Even if it’s at the aforementioned point where I’d like to smash the toy, once I find myself starting with, “Oh, girls, this is so sad…” I actually start to feel the empathy, which makes it easier to continue, “I know you both love playing with this toy, but It looks like you can’t figure out how to make it work right now, so I’ll take it for now and you can try again later.”

It does take some time to train ourselves to have the empathetic statement ready, but once we do, it’s great for our kids, our relationships, and ourselves.