Instead of feeling sympathy when our child hurts, we keep our perspective and find a teaching moment when we practice empathy. While sympathy implies a sharing or entering into the feelings of another, empathy is simply understanding the other person's feelings.
See the difference. Empathy allows us to stay in our adult self, while sympathy carries us into a trap of overinvolvement and emotional immaturity. Empathy is natural in a caring parent-child relationship and it's a basic component of good family communication. Sympathy feels natural, but it undermines good communication and hinders emotional development.
When your child is feeling a negative emotion, remember this distinction and avoid the sympathy trap. Instead, listen for the feeling in your child's verbal and nonverbal behavior; and then, put the feeling in words to communicate empathy.
Often, this expression of empathy is all that is needed. Don't feel that you must jump in and take the feeling away or solve the problem for your child. Give him some space to experience his own feeling so that he can learn from it, thus building the skills of emotional intelligence.
