Empathetic Listening – How to Listen So Your Kids Will Too

Empathetic Listening - How to Listen to Kids So They'll Listen to You

Being able to respond and interact with the world whole-heartedly is fuel for flight and healthy living. A big part of this involves being aware of how we feel and how others feel, and managing those feelings to preserve relationships and satisfy needs. None of us were born knowing how to do this. It’s why the apprenticeship towards adulthood starts at the small human stage and lasts decades. So much to learn!>Empathetic listening is a powerful way to build this emotional awareness in children, open them up to your guidance and grow their emotional intelligence.

Opportunities for empathetic listening will present themselves all the time, but they won’t always present themselves gently. And certainly not always adorably. Being human is never that simple.

The opportunities will often be hidden in big feelings, tantrums, resistance, tears, tempers, frustration, anxiety, sadness, jealousy, confusion. As draining and as maddening as these situations can be, they are rich with the lessons that all kids need to learn to be healthy, capable, thriving adults. As with so much of life, the best way to learn is often in the midst of the mess. 

When your child is broken-hearted, furious, or confused, empathetic listening can help you to break through. The key lies in trying to understand what your child is experiencing. Their experiences might not always make logical sense, but they don’t need to (cue the distress at discovering there’s no Dory in Dory yoghurt). There is something more important than understanding the situation, and that’s understanding how they feel about it. This is where empathetic listening is gold. 

What is empathetic listening?

Empathetic listening involves tuning in to what your child is feeling. When you listen empathetically, the connection between you and your child will deepen, as will their budding self-awareness. 

This doesn’t mean that you’ll approve of how they’ve expressed themselves. The idea is that when they feel closer to you and more understood, your capacity to guide them and to be heard by them is expanded. The benefit is so mutual. When they feel your love, warmth and understanding, the big feelings that are breathing to life inside them will start to ease. When this happens, they’ll be open to your wisdom and your guidance, and to learning the lessons that all kids need to learn.

Okay then. Tell me how it’s done.

Here are the basic principles for empathetic listening. The aim is to understand what your child is feeling. Once your child feels heard, there is a clear way forward for dialogue and any lessons that need to be learned.

  1. Open up to all of the information that’s coming to you.

    Empathetic listening involves collecting whatever information you need to tune into your child’s experience. Use your eyes to notice their body language, gestures or facial expressions, your ears to hear their words; your imagination try to see things from where they are; and your heart – you already have a deep connection with your child and you know them child better than anyone – use your heart to get a sense of what they might be feeling. 

  2. Gently reflect back.

    Once you have the information, share it with your child, in a gentle, non-judgemental way. What your child needs more than anything is to feel heard. There is a sweet relief that will come when they realise that you ‘get’ them. 

  3. Respond to the feelings behind the words.

    Respond to the feelings behind the behaviour. When emotional things happen, it won’t help to be logical or to try to explain the unreasonableness of what they are feeling. For example, a baby brother has ‘stolen’ a very important hat – the one with Elsa on it. Now he’s putting it in his mouth, ‘like with spit and everything’. Rather than responding to the situation, ‘he won’t hurt your hat’, try responding to the feelings. ‘You’re worried he’s going to ruin your hat. I understand that. I know you’re a great sharer. What can you share with him that he can put in his mouth?’ Their actions might be messy and their words might be unhelpful, but their feelings behind them will be valid. 

  4. Name big feelings. So good for so many reasons.

    Naming an emotion can soothe the nervous system and help kids to find their way back from big feelings. For healthy functioning, the emotionally vibrant right brain and the logical, linguistic left brain need to stay connected and working together. The left brain is dominant in logic and language. It gives logical structure and meaning to the emotional experiences of the right brain. When there is an emotional tidal wave, the right side of the brain ‘disconnects’ from the left. This is when things feel out of control because for a little while, that’s exactly what happens – the big emotions that live in the right brain are out of the control of the calming, logical influence of the left brain.

    When you name what you think they might be experiencing, you are effectively ‘loaning’ your left brain by providing the words that will give structure and meaning to their feelings. ‘You really want to keep playing don’t you. You’re not ready to pack up yet. That sounds frustrating for you. I’d be frustrated too if I had to stop doing something I wanted to keep doing.’

    Think of it like turning on a light for them. When you name the feeling, it stops coming at them from the dark. They can start to get a sense of it, contain it, and start to deal with it. Naming a feeling also helps them to realise that they aren’t alone and that there are feelings that everyone experiences from time to time. 

    By naming the feeling that they might be feeling (give them space to tell you that they’re not), you’re helping to expand their emotional vocabulary. They might be ‘angry’ – or they might be frustrated, exhausted, jealous, furious. The more awareness they have of their own emotional experience, the more capacity they’ll have to identify those feelings in others. This is the heartbeat of emotional intelligence and when this flourishes, so will they. 

  5. Sometimes there will be mixed emotions – let them know that’s okay.

    Different emotions can land in the same place at the same time. For example, a child might be going on a fabulous holiday, but without one of their parents. They will likely feel super-excited, but a little sad as well, and perhaps a bit anxious or guilty about leaving the other parent behind. If you can name what you see, feel or think, and reassure them that it’s completely okay to feel different feelings at the same time – you’ll be giving them the strong, steady, loving presence they need. When they have the ‘permission’ to feel confusing feelings, they can stop fighting them. The feelings will be free to come, and then they will go.

  6. They’re doing their detective work too. Be careful with the vibes you’re sending out.

    Kids are clever. They pick up everything! While you’re trying to read them, they will also be reading you. Be careful with the information you send their way – your voice, your posture, the words you use, the distance between you. If you can (and you might not always have it in you – parents are human too), try to slow things down, position yourself so your eyes are level with theirs, and be with them in the moment. 

  7. You don’t need to fix anything.

    Feelings don’t always appear to make sense but they always have a good reason for being there. You don’t need to argue the facts or point out the reasons they ‘shouldn’t’ be feeling the way they do. You don’t need to fix anything. When they feel heard and understood, their connection with you will deepen, their big emotions will start to soothe, your influence will widen and the ‘fixing’ will take care of itself. 

And finally …

However curly their responses or behaviour might be, children never do what they do to be ‘bad’. Big feelings are overwhelming, and it takes time to learn how to manage them. Even as adults, there will likely be days where the big feelings win. 

When you listen empathetically, your child will feel heard and understood. They will feel your support and when they relax into this, they’re ready to listen to you and open up to your guidance. The best way to be heard is to listen. Their feelings don’t have to make sense to you, but it will always be something wonderful for them, if you can help their feelings make sense to them.

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We don’t need to protect kids from the discomfort of anxiety.

We’ll want to, but as long as they’re safe (including in their bodies with sensory and physiological needs met), we don’t need to - any more than we need to protect them from the discomfort of seatbelts, bike helmets, boundaries, brushing their teeth.

Courage isn’t an absence of anxiety. It’s the anxiety that makes something brave. Courage is about handling the discomfort of anxiety.

When we hold them back from anxiety, we hold them back - from growth, from discovery, and from building their bravery muscles.

The distress and discomfort that come with anxiety won’t hurt them. What hurts them is the same thing that hurts all of us - feeling alone in distress. So this is what we will protect them from - not the anxiety, but feeling alone in it.

To do this, speak to the anxiety AND the courage. 

This will also help them feel safer with their anxiety. It puts a story of brave to it rather than a story of deficiency (‘I feel like this because there’s something wrong with me,’) or a story of disaster (‘I feel like this because something bad is about to happen.’).

Normalise, see them, and let them feel you with them. This might sound something like:

‘This feels big doesn’t it. Of course you feel anxious. You’re doing something big/ brave/ important, and that’s how brave feels. It feels scary, stressful, big. It feels like anxiety. It feels like you feel right now. I know you can handle this. We’ll handle it together.’

It doesn’t matter how well they handle it and it doesn’t matter how big the brave thing is. The edges are where the edges are, and anxiety means they are expanding those edges.

We don’t get strong by lifting toothpicks. We get strong by lifting as much as we can, and then a little bit more for a little bit longer. And we do this again and again, until that feels okay. Then we go a little bit further. Brave builds the same way - one brave step after another.

It doesn’t matter how long it takes and it doesn’t matter how big the steps are. If they’ve handled the discomfort of anxiety for a teeny while today, then they’ve been brave today. And tomorrow we’ll go again again.♥️
Feeling seen, safe, and cared for is a biological need. It’s not a choice and it’s not pandering. It’s a biological need.

Children - all of us - will prioritise relational safety over everything. 

When children feel seen, safe, and a sense of belonging they will spend less resources in fight, flight, or withdrawal, and will be free to divert those resources into learning, making thoughtful choices, engaging in ways that can grow them.

They will also be more likely to spend resources seeking out those people (their trusted adults at school) or places (school) that make them feel good about themselves, rather than avoiding the people of spaces that make them feel rubbish or inadequate.

Behaviour support and learning support is about felt safety support first. 

The schools and educators who know this and practice it are making a profound difference, not just for young people but for all of us. They are actively engaging in crime prevention, mental illness prevention, and nurturing strong, beautiful little people into strong, beautiful big ones.♥️
Emotion is e-motion. Energy in motion.

When emotions happen, we have two options: express or depress. That’s it. They’re the options.

When your young person (or you) is being swamped by big feelings, let the feelings come.

Hold the boundary around behaviour - keep them physically safe and let them feel their relationship with you is safe, but you don’t need to fix their feelings.

They aren’t a sign of breakage. They’re a sign your child is catalysing the energy. Our job over the next many years is to help them do this respectfully.

When emotional energy is shut down, it doesn’t disappear. It gets held in the body and will come out sideways in response to seemingly benign things, or it will drive distraction behaviours (such as addiction, numbness).

Sometimes there’ll be a need for them to control that energy so they can do what they need to do - go to school, take the sports field, do the exam - but the more we can make way for expression either in the moment or later, the safer and softer they’ll feel in their minds and bodies.

Expression is the most important part of moving through any feeling. This might look like talking, moving, crying, writing, yelling.

This is why you might see big feelings after school. It’s often a sign that they’ve been controlling themselves all day - through the feelings that come with learning new things, being quiet and still, trying to get along with everyone, not having the power and influence they need (that we all need). When they get into the car at pickup, finally those feelings they’ve been holding on to have a safe place to show up and move through them and out of them.

It can be so messy! It takes time to learn how to lasso feelings and words into something unmessy.

In the meantime, our job is to hold a tender, strong, safe place for that emotional energy to move out of them.

Hold the boundary around behaviour where you can, add warmth where you can, and when they are calm talk about what happened and how they might do things differently next time. And be patient. Just because someone tells us how to swing a racket, doesn’t mean we’ll win Wimbledon tomorrow. Good things take time, and loads of practice.♥️
Thank you Adelaide! Thank you for your stories, your warmth, for laughing with me, spaghetti bodying with me (when you know, you know), for letting me scribble on your books, and most of all, for letting me be a part of your world today.

So proud to share the stage with Steve Biddulph, @matt.runnalls ,
@michellemitchell.author, and @nathandubsywant. To @sharonwittauthor - thank you for creating this beautiful, brave space for families to come together and grow stronger.

And to the parents, carers, grandparents - you are extraordinary and it’s a privilege to share the space with you. 

Parenting is big work. Tender, gritty, beautiful, hard. It asks everything of us - our strength, our softness, our growth. We’re raising beautiful little people into beautiful big people, and at the same time, we’re growing ourselves. 

Sometimes that growth feels impatient and demanding - like we’re being wrenched forward before we’re ready, before our feet have found the ground. 

But that’s the nature of growth isn’t it. It rarely waits for permission. It asks only that we keep moving.

And that’s okay. 

There’s no rush. You have time. We have time.

In the meantime they will keep growing us, these little humans of ours. Quietly, daily, deeply. They will grow us in the most profound ways if we let them. And we must let them - for their sake, for our own, and for the ancestral threads that tie us to the generations that came before us, and those that will come because of us. We will grow for them and because of them.♥️
Their words might be messy, angry, sad. They might sound bigger than the issue, or as though they aren’t about the issue at all. 

The words are the warning lights on the dashboard. They’re the signal that something is wrong, but they won’t always tell us exactly what that ‘something’ is. Responding only to the words is like noticing the light without noticing the problem.

Our job isn’t to respond to their words, but to respond to the feelings and the need behind the words.

First though, we need to understand what the words are signalling. This won’t always be obvious and it certainly won’t always be easy. 

At first the signal might be blurry, or too bright, or too loud, or not obvious.

Unless we really understand the problem behind signal - the why behind words - we might inadvertently respond to what we think the problem is, not what the problem actually is. 

Words can be hard and messy, and when they are fuelled by big feelings that can jet from us with full force. It is this way for all of us. 

Talking helps catalyse the emotion, and (eventually) bring the problem into a clearer view.

But someone needs to listen to the talking. You won’t always be able to do this - you’re human too - but when you can, it will be one of the most powerful ways to love them through their storms.

If the words are disrespectful, try:

‘I want to hear you but I love you too much to let you think it’s okay to speak like that. Do you want to try it a different way?’ 

Expectations, with support. Leadership, with warmth. Then, let them talk.

Our job isn’t to fix them - they aren’t broken. Our job is to understand them so we can help them feel seen, safe, and supported through the big of it all. When we do this, we give them what they need to find their way through.♥️

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