Empathy and the parent/child relationship

One of the areas of challenge as a parent is giving room to our child’s uncomfortable feelings particularly if you are also frightened by big emotions.

‘If your experience is that I did that, I can understand that might feel incredibly hard’ How do we do this without sounding patronising. Its often about attuning to tone and matching the affect of the young person. This deepens Empathy, the E of PACE as discussed by Dan Hughes in DDP.

It is important as a parent to take charge of a repair apologising for the part we took in a situation.

One of the approaches I offer is to give offer parents an opportunity to identify the parallels between a parent and child’s upbringing and identify emotions that were not allowed in the parent. This can then play out in a parent asking a child to offer her what his/her own parents did not.

The DDP model spends as much time as needed to prepare a parent so that once a child is introduced to sessions, a parent is prepared and notices their own triggers. The path to an improved relationship can then commence.