I am a very empathetic person. I say this not to brag, but because it is not always a good thing, especially when you’re parenting an emotional four-year-old. While empathy is something that we try to stir up in our children, especially when they are young and they are just discovering that other people have feelings, it’s sometimes a characteristic that I need to temper. I’ll tell you why.
Lately, my daughter has been having a very hard time going to preschool and separating from me in general. This involves a vast meltdown into a screaming puddle of four-year-old. My first inclination is to bundle the poor dear up in my arms and cuddle her until everything feels better. The problem with that is that I still need to leave the house, she still needs to go to preschool, and so we repeat the scenario five minutes later when I realize that I am actually going to be late if I don’t go right now.
Now, I am not saying that it’s bad to snuggle your crying child. Far from it. I also don’t believe that she’s manipulating me, at least not with quiet forethought. No, I think that she is sincerely overwhelmed by her emotions, and she wants me to stay and hug her. I can’t, and that breaks my heart.
It’s when I let her know that it breaks my heart that we fall down. I have to be the adult here. Drat. That means that I need to be in control of my emotions. When she’s crying, and I’m feeling sad too and hugging her, that’s fine. However, in all of my empathy I sometimes forget an important thing: I also need to teach her how to help herself feel better. While we wallow around in our sadness, she feels sad, I feel sad, and we feel sad together. We could spend the whole morning feeling sad, if I didn’t need to get to work.
We’re focusing now on coping strategies so that she doesn’t carry her sadness around. We all feel sad sometimes, and we will always have sad feelings. However, I am trying to teach her ways to help herself feel happy once again. This a big task – how have you accomplished it?