Want to give your kids a strong foundation for life? Parenting with empathy is linked to everything from healthy attachment to emotional intelligence and solid relationship skills!
But it’s not always easy, particularly when we’re stressed or our children display challenging behaviors. Below are sixteen quotes to help you master parenting with empathy.
Quotes to Guide You in Parenting with Empathy
Quote 1: When we don’t understand a behavior, we tend to assume a child is doing it on purpose. – @raisinghumankind
Quote 2: The more we can look underneath a child’s behavior to understand it, the more compassion we’ll have. – Unknown
Quote 3: Beneath every behavior, there is a feeling. And beneath each feeling is a need. And when we meet that need rather than focus on the behavior, we begin to deal with the cause, not the symptom. – Ashleigh Warner
Quote 4: When a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs. – Dr. Dan Siegel
Quote 5: When kids believe your first goal is to empathize and understand rather than to admonish and correct, you leave the door open for future conversations. – Philip Daniel De Jesus
Quote 6: Kids will hear you better if you speak from a voice of compassion instead of authority. They long to be understood more than to be lectured. – Inspired by Dodinsky
Quote 7: Our kids want us to give them a safe space to process their hard feelings more than they want us to fix all their problems. – Shelly Robinson
Quote 8: As a parent, the coolest tool I learned a while back was when one of my kids started complaining to me about something was to say, “do you need me to get involved, offer advice, or just listen?” 9/10, they just want my ear. – Inspired by Tobias Buckell
Quote 9: It’s crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child’s feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child. It’s vital that we treat them as such in our response. – Daniel J. Siegel
Quote 10: What people of all ages can use in a moment of distress is not agreement or disagreement; they need someone to recognize what it is they’re experiencing. – Adele Faber
Quote 11: Children don’t need to have their feelings agreed with; they need to have them acknowledged. The more you try to push their unhappy feelings away, the more they become stuck in them. The more comfortable you can be accepting the bad feelings, the easier it is for kids to let them go. – Inspired by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish
Quote 12: Sometimes parents avoid talking about upsetting experiences, thinking that doing so will reinforce their children’s pain or make things worse. But telling the story is often exactly what children need to make sense of the event and move on to a place where they can feel better about what happened. – Unknown
Quote 13: By acknowledging our children’s emotions, we are helping them learn skills for soothing themselves, skills that will serve them well for a lifetime. – John Gottman, Ph.D.
Quote 14: The goal is for children to express their wants and needs with us openly. That doesn’t mean they always get what they want. It means they feel safe enough to share—even when the answer is no. – Inspired by @dr.siggie
Quote 15: The next time you lock horns with your child and tempers are flaring, remember this… It is likely a head-on collision of both parent and child not feeling seen or heard in that moment. As the adult with more power and resources, it is our job to recognize this and remove our egos from the equation so we can parent from a place of calm, curiosity, and compassion. – Shelly Robinson
Quote 16: Don’t normalize pain or neglect by refusing to be a safe haven for your child because the “real world won’t coddle them when they grow up.” Show them what love and respect look like so they’ll recognize when they’re being mistreated. – Amanda Erickson
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