What is Emotional Empathy, and why is it essential for your child's develpment?

 

© Mira Katja Watson, Sep 2011

Emotional empathy is the basis of attuned attention to a child, which helps regulate the child’s emotions and establish a healthy and functioning brain, nervous system and immune system.  It is vital for development.  Emotional empathy involves being emotionally available and present with the child – a form of attentive and neutral “being with” – and

this is a very crucial experience for the child’s healthy development.

 

What do babies need?

 

Babies are like the raw material for a self, and how they are treated affects how they develop. This applies not just to food and clothing, but especially to emotional responsiveness. In the early months of life a baby is establishing what the normal state of physical arousal is in terms of chemical and electrical nervous system signals. A normal range is established through social interaction, by the baby co-ordinating his systems with those of people around him.

 

Babies who are given an attuned response learn to expect a world that is responsive to feelings and that will help bring intense states back to a manageable level. It is only by experiencing having it done for them that they learn to do it for themselves. Baby’s systems are so sensitive that if early experience is inadequate, the stress response can be adversely affected, and brain growth and development may be hindered. Research indicates that the outcome seems to depend far more on how responsive the parents are than on the baby’s innate character or genetics. So parental relational ability is crucial in shaping the child.

 

What does Emotional Empathy do for the baby?   The most important thing for the baby is the degree to which the parent is emotionally available and present with him to notice how he is, because this helps him regulate his emotions. It involves tuning into the baby’s emotional and physical state empathetically, and calming him down or stimulating him to get him to a comfortable level. Regulation is about relieving the baby’s discomfort, since babies cannot do this for themselves. A frightened child, for exmple, needs to be soothed. This takes the sympathetic nervous system from a state of frantic flight or fight, back to the calming effect of the parasympathetic system.

 

For many parents this is a totally natural, unprobelmatic and normal response to their baby, and happens without thinking about it. Touch, tone of voice, and feeling the parent’s calm nervous system all help the baby to get back to tolerable levels of stimulation in the body.

 

In practice, an available and responsive parent is just being there, feeling the child’s state and responding. Attuned attention or emotional empathy is the basis for regulation. For some parents who are always busy thinking or in their heads, or worrying, being this present with their child can be a wonderful revelation. It is the only true basis for relating to the child. (Fortunately it is a skill that can be learned by anyone – if you are interested in knowing more, please enquire about our Transformational Parenting course. We teach the basics of attuned attention, emotional regulation in self and others, relating and becoming aware of your own patterns).

 

Emotional regulation is  often about responding to feelings in a non-verbal way – through touch, tone of voice, look. For example a mother soothes her screaming over-aroused baby by engaging her with a load voice that mirrors the pitch and emotion, and then gently calms her expression, taking her down into a calmer state. Or she might relax a baby by rocking him, or tickle and laugh with a sad, disinterested baby. This monitoring and adjustment needs to be a continuous task for many many months at the beginning of the infant’s life. Without it they cannot develop properly, phsically or socially, and suffer later on.

 

Getting or not getting attuned attention affects the growth and connections to the pre-frontal cortex, or social brain. In infancy and the toddler years, the part of the pre-frontal cortex involved in verbalising feelings may not develop adequately, and this part of the brain has been strongly implicated in depression. Without the social brain connections, the child and later adults suffers in lacking external connection too.

 

Problems

 

If parents cannot feel, name or regulate their own feelings, they will not be able to feel their baby, and so won’t respond to their needs for regulation. The baby will be left in chaos, without a clear sense of how to keep level, and maybe even thinking they shouldn’t have feelings, because they have been ignored.  In this case these early experiences may lead to a child assuming that there will not be others emotionally available to help notice and process feelings, or to help them get back to feeling ok. So both regulating and labelling a baby’s feelings can be difficult for a parent whose own awareness of their states is impaired. And yet such family patterns of poor regulation need not be passed on to the next generation, because any adult can learn to provide attuned attention if they are willing, as detailed in the Transformational Parenting course.

 

Similarly, if an adult is not able to feel their own negative emotions such as anger or frustration, they will tend to try to supress or avoid them in their children. Often they will lash out at the child when the child is angry because they can’t control their own response. In that case the child will probably try to hold back their feelings, in essence to protect the parent from their own feelings. This is wholy inappropriate. The child then learns that they get no regulatory help, and will learn to suppress or switch off those feelings – which don’t go away.

 

If you are reading this and realizing all the things you have done “wrong” as a parent, the good news is that what it takes to put them right, is learning to give attuned attention. When adults go for therapy, this is what the therapist is doing in order to teach them to learn to regulate their own emotions, to remedy childhood neglect. As a parent, the sooner you start being with your kids in this way, the faster their potential will recover and develop. And everyone is able to learn, because its an innate human ability.

 

Children simply need recognition of the psychological self – the thinking and feeling self. They need people willing to get on their wavelength, understanding how they are feeling, helping them express it, otherwise they can’t get a sense of themselves, or a sense of their own identity. Our sense of self is very dependent on this feedback from others. If there is little parental response at all, or it is negative, we can feel non-existent, invalidated and basically bad. It becomes harder to make sense of feelings without a framework of ongoing support and the sense of self becomes increasingly tenuous. And in practice this means that children need to relate to adults who respond to the actual present moment needs of the child, and not to their own idea, or an idea of what they think the child might need. They need adults who are really there.