When a child’s emotions begin to fluctuate significantly, parents understand that empathy can help the child regain calmness and rationality. If parents want to use empathy with their child, it is important to establish rapport. Sometimes, no matter how much empathy is used, the child still may not respond positively and continues to cry and make a scene, which may be due to overlooking this: your language is not aligned with the child’s emotional frequency and intensity.
Spanish neuropsychologist Dr. Alvaro Bilbao likens this alignment of language and emotion to a super-sized radio. Different emotions are tuned into different channels; sadness and unhappiness are on the same emotional frequency, but sadness has a lower intensity; happiness and joy are also on the same frequency, but joy has a higher intensity.
In real life, we have many words to express different emotions. For example, to express a joyful mood, one can use terms such as love, happiness, calmness, encouragement, satisfaction, and so on. The emotion of love can be categorized from weak to strong as love, affection, liking, intimacy, familial affection, empathy, etc.
Therefore, we can conclude that to accurately and reasonably use empathy, our emotional vocabulary cannot be too limited. Only then can we perceive the child’s different emotions in various situations and respond accurately to them.
This will make the child feel that the parent is seriously responding to them and cares about their feelings, thus bridging the gap between them. The child will realize that the parent not only allows them to eat ice cream but also deeply understands how joyful it is to eat ice cream.
If you approach the child normally and say, “Baby has wet their pants; it’s okay,” this weakens the emotional experience. But if you say, “Baby wet their pants, so you feel sad, right?” this empathy does not resonate. At that moment, the child’s emotions are very tense and anxious because they couldn’t hold their pee and wet themselves, feeling out of control and fearing that seeing their parents will lead to being blamed for their feelings.
Because of this, you can accurately observe the child’s emotions; their feelings are often written on their face, easily discernible as happy or sad. When they cannot control their emotions, you can use similar frequency and intensity words from that emotional vocabulary to communicate with the child and create resonance.
