The Empathy Problem for Parents
In my therapy practice, I have noticed a recent trend of kids and teens who seem like they are actually doing pretty well in life. But their parents are worried about them enough to bring them in for therapy. I imagine the constant headlines about today’s kids and teens being the most distressed youth ever aren’t helping, but I’m starting to wonder what else might be skewing parents’ perspectives of what are typical emotional ups and downs, and what needs professional help. Based on observations, I have come to believe that too much empathy is at least partially to blame.
I am fortunate to have an early copy of psychologist Lisa Damour’s upcoming book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers (out February—you can order now and I recommend it!). Out of the gate, Damour addresses this very trend. She analyzed it in a way that reinforces a theory I have been silently entertaining for a while now: our culture views any distress as a problem to be fixed. The message is if we don’t feel constantly content, then we need to do something about it (usually involving buying a product or service).
However, “constantly content” doesn’t exist because emotions by their nature are temporary. This general cultural pressure on positive emotions seems to have translated to parents’ discomfort with their own distress and about their children’s. Damour blames the wellness industry, in part, for defining emotional wellness wrong. I agree. I would add that while empathy for our children is essential, too much empathy can be damaging.
Too Much Empathy
Well-intentioned parenting guidance of late seems to advise a bottomless well of empathy for our children. But the pursuit of this level of empathy compromises our children’s emotional health. The current rising star of “gentle parenting” revolves around understanding our children’s emotions, with the aim of helping them develop their own emotional skills. I am in full agreement with the importance of understanding and validating our children’s emotional experiences; however, what I see in real life is how this spotlight on empathy may be dovetailing with continued intensive parenting practices to explode into a crisis of our young people developing poor emotional skills.
In short, empathy overdrive has undermined the very benefits we mean to achieve in raising emotionally healthy children.
It sounds strange for a child psychologist to say there’s such thing as too much empathy for our children. Of course, I promote understanding our child’s emotions and how they drive behavior, and accepting our child’s emotional experience.
The parenting zeitgeist of the last decade or so has put these ideas front and center:
Address a child’s emotions to influence their behavior instead of only focusing on the behavior
Invest time and energy into building up the parent-child relationship for the child’s well-being and to have less family conflict
Accomplish both by having empathy for your child
Showing empathy and using perspective-taking to understand and validate a child’s emotional experience are two tools fundamental to the autonomy-supportive framework I just wrote a book about.
Here's the problem: when we are so emotionally aligned with our child that we take on their emotions. Their emotions become indistinguishable from ours. This can make it difficult to set important limits and enact necessary discipline. [Scene: Crying young teen refuses to wear a bike helmet for fear of social embarrassment = heart strings pulled! Mom understands where she’s coming from emotionally! But preventing a traumatic brain injury is a high-priority limit to maintain. Mom needs to tolerate the big distress of young teen. End Scene.]
More so, and contrary to the whole point of having lots of empathy in parenting, too much empathy can interfere with our child’s healthy emotional development. It’s all about distress tolerance: theirs and ours.
Distress Tolerance
Known in psychology as key to psychological health, distress tolerance is what it sounds like: a skill of tolerating discomfort and distress. There is great risk to its opposite, distress intolerance, including substance abuse, severe depression, and anxiety. In my therapy practice, I help all ages build this core skill of psychological well-being: how to feel the feelings instead of escape them.
“One of the most essential life skills we can nurture in our children is learning they can feel all the hard feelings—grief, sadness, anger, rejection, guilt—and be okay. ”
What does this have to do with parenting? I have noticed that parents often rescue their child from emotional pain instead of allowing them to experience it. Our child’s discomfort makes us uncomfortable and we want to make it better. We want their bad feeling to stop, like putting a band-aid on a bloody knee. Or, we want to prevent it in the first place, so we curate experiences to be as safe and sanitized as possible.
Think about it: when your 4th grader comes home crying about how her best friends left her out at recess, what’s your impulse? It’s normal to get mad at the friends and have the urge to reach out to their parents to make sure their children include your child. It’s hard to see our children in distress, and the more we have built an emotionally connected relationship, the more likely we will feel that distress more deeply. Our brains have been wired by evolution to protect our children from all types of threat and possible harm. But we need to harness these most primal impulses by using our more sophisticated thinking skills of impulse control and thinking about the future.
If we jump in to fix the feelings, not only does it look like we help our child feel better, we feel better, too. The alternative—watching our child cry in emotional pain and coaching them through both feeling their rejection and figuring out how they want to respond to it—is harder and more painful for us. But also better for us and them in the long-term because the future cost is young adults who become easily overwhelmed by stress and difficult emotions, leading to avoidance of hard stuff, and higher risk for ill-being instead of well-being.
In fact, a 2019 study found that avoidance was the link between “helicopter” parenting and anxiety and depression in college students; a 2020 study found that emotional distress intolerance was the link between overparenting and college students’ mental health problems.
Short Term Gain, Long Term Pain
Besides avoiding our own discomfort, emotionally protecting our children can make us feel like “good” parents. In a moment when we can stop our child’s wave of distress, this reinforces our own egos and soothes our fears about letting down our child. The problem is that this impulse does let down our children in a fundamental way. They don’t learn how to feel the feelings and develop emotional resilience. Ironically, as supported by research cited above, this puts our children at higher risk for mental health problems like anxiety and depression instead of protecting them.
One of the most essential life skills we can nurture in our children is learning they can feel all the hard feelings—grief, sadness, anger, rejection, guilt—and be okay. Each time they feel instead of avoid, and realize it passes like a raincloud to feel pleasant feelings again, they are building emotional resilience.
Empathy for the Empathy Problem
I may be so attuned to this problem of empathy in parenting because of my lived experience. As a highly emotionally sensitive person who works with children, I feel my own children’s feelings pretty strongly. When I look at one of my children in a rage of despair, I often (not always) know what’s underlying that despair and my heart literally hurts in my chest. Even when my pre-teen or young teen cries or yells in response to the most minor of triggers (“stop LOOKING at me!”), knowing their puberty-riddled brains are experiencing emotions in a heightened way makes me ache for them.
I have slipped into attempting to talk my children out of their emotions more times than I like to admit because it’s such an automatic impulse. However, I don’t know if it’s having two psychologists as parents or they were born naturally wise, but my kids actually resist these attempts. As I tried to put a positive spin on the stress of the day, one child has literally told me, “Just stop. I want to be alone.”
This gives me empathy for all the parents also struggling with emotional boundaries and wanting to rescue their children from emotional pain. However, I hope my testament that backing off and letting our children feel their feelings is truly the path to health is persuasive enough to tamp down your evolutionary impulse to protect.
In response to a recent personal crisis, my daughter approached me in tears and fell into a tight hug. I held her in my arms while she cried, validating her sadness instead of talking her out of it. After a few minutes, she gave me a kiss on the cheek and left to make herself some food. And I felt like a "good" parent despite fixing nothing.
References
Helicopter Parenting and Emotion Regulation in U.S. College Students
Overparenting and emerging adults’ mental health: The mediating role of emotional distress tolerance
**You can pre-order my book Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent, Confident Children on Amazon and Bookshop.