I remember many years ago, our family was walking around the riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas. Our kids were young then with my second oldest son, Cameron, around 4 or 5 years old. We were all together but there was a dense press of people all around us. Suddenly, I realized Cameron was not with us. I looked around here and there in the nearby area but could not find him. Then I started darting here and there looking for him, but he was still nowhere to be found.
If you haven’t been to the riverwalk of San Antonio, it is a hub of restaurants and shops that are a level down from downtown traffic. It’s really a long expanse of walks on both sides of the river for a mile or two. In numerous places along the walk on both sides are stairs that go up to the city block. If someone had taken my son, they could easily have gone up to the street level quickly and undetected—and be long gone.
Needless to say, I ran in a panicked and adrenaline-charged state for what seemed like miles looking for my son. My wife told a police officer on a boat along the river to look for him. I ran along the walk on one side saying a silent prayer, pleading for me to be guided to my child.
Finally, I walked along an area of the walk that didn’t have any shops and was less dense.
Suddenly, I heard a little voice on the other side of the river say, “Daddy!” I looked over and found a woman walking with him. I quickly looked for a way to get to the other side and found a nearby bridge that went over the river to the other side. I quickly scaled up and down the steps to reach my son and swoop him up into my arms with a big hug. I even hugged the woman, too.
We were so happy to have him back and grateful that nothing bad had happened. But I want to talk about the bridge and use it as a metaphor for this article.
Imagine you saw your child on the other side of a river—let’s say one that was wide, deep, and raging—and it could not be crossed wading across without you being washed away. But you see your child sad, scared, and alone and pleading for you to come be there with them.
Then imagine you find a bridge, kind of secret or hidden, but one that spanned over the river and allowed you to cross to the other side. How grateful would you be to discover that bridge in your time of need? I imagine words would be inadequate to express.
In this article, I want to share a key approach with your children that can help you create or find this hidden or secret bridge to the hearts of your children. It’s a bridge that many parents miss when they’re searching for a way to connect with their children emotionally or don’t recognize it as a bridge. However, as a trained child therapist for over 30 years, I have used this bridge over and over again for the children I have seen in therapy. I have also used it with my own kids.
If you want to emotionally connect with your young children more deeply and build a solid bridge to their hearts, there is one essential key that I believe can help you do so: Use empathy and emotional reflection instead of or before explanations and interventions.
When children express troubled feelings, many parents make one of two big mistakes. One is getting mad at them or scolding them for their feelings and punishing or disciplining them. Many parents see their child’s expressions as whiny or as a way to try to cause trouble in the home. They see their emotional expressions as unacceptable or inappropriate.
True, sometimes kids get whiny, but many times they really are sad, scared, or upset and are just trying to express themselves. By getting mad at them for expressing themselves in what we perceive to be negative, just chops that bridge to their hearts into pieces. It destroys trust and makes the kids feel more isolated or like their feelings are bad or unacceptable.
Less harmful but still ineffective is using explanations and redirections when kids express their troubled feelings. Many parents tell their children that they’re just being overly dramatic or appealing to logic to explain that things aren’t that bad. While this doesn’t chop the bridge down, the parent using this approach is not crossing the bridge, but instead, willfully staying on the other side of their metaphorical river trying to assure the child the parent is there for them and they’re really not alone. This doesn’t help the child feel any better nor feel understood and heard. There is no emotional connection being created by that parent and no bridge being crossed.
What needs to be done is to respond with empathy and use emotional reflections when our kids express their hurt or troubled feelings. Feeling empathy is putting ourselves in the perspective of someone else and trying to imagine how they think and feel. Expressing empathy is using responses to let them know we get it and can see their perspective.
One effective way to do this is using reflections. Reflections are statements that reflect what the child is feeling: “It sounds like you’re really sad about that,” “It sounds like you’re really missing Grandma right now,” or “You’re really worried about that.” These statements reflect back the feeling the child is expressing AND show acceptance and validation for it. This allows the child to feel heard, understood, and accepted, and it creates a solid bridge between our hearts and theirs.
Kids most often don’t need logical answers or responses from the “parent logic center”—at least not at first. Instead, they need a caring parent who can enter their world calmly and compassionately and show love and comfort. This is one huge ingredient of creating solid and secure attachment relationships with our kids.
After the child feels heard, understood and accepted, there may be room to gently redirect their thought process and invite them to look at it from a different perspective. However, many times that isn’t even needed at all. A child who feels understood, loved, and accepted may be able to soothe and comfort themselves with your help and may not even need that “parent logic center” explanation.
Once the bridge is crossed by the parent, the children know it’s safe to cross it back over to get to solid ground with their parent by their side so they feel safe and soothed once again. It’s like a warm embrace like one I gave my son, Cameron, at the Riverwalk in San Antonio.
About the author: Darryl Haslam, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical social worker and a doctoral level marriage and family therapist. He is the director and owner of Emotional Freedom Child and Family Counseling in south Provo. In addition to individual and family therapy with children, teens, and adults, he teaches parenting classes to help parents more effectively respond to their children’s and teens’ emotions. Feel free to contact his office for more information on these classes or counseling services.
