Everybody touts the benefits of mastering the art of empathy. Feel your feels! It\u2019s true, this\u00a0is crucial. Empathy creates compassion, which fuels activism. It creates a fighter for the bullied, the oppressed, and the underrepresented. It builds a barrier against callousness. It\u2019s the perfect vaccine<\/a> against jadedness and cynicism.<\/p>\n

Hence, every parent wants to be an Atticus educating a Scout. We want them to walk in another person\u2019s shoes for a little bit to gain some perspective.<\/p>\n

But my daughter cried for three days when the circus clowns pushed Dumbo off the high dive. Three days. \u201cWhy did they push him, Mama? Why was everybody laughing? Didn\u2019t they notice he was crying? Didn\u2019t they care that he was scared?\u201d Then she asked to watch it again, a sucker for punishment. She wanted to see all the bullying clich\u00e9s on repeat. She cried every time, as did I. The apple does\u00a0not fall far from its weepy mother.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also developed the habit of grabbing my face, staring into my eyes in a sweet-verging-on-creepy way, and asking, \u201cAre you happy now? Sad now? Mad now?\u201d Whatever the answer, I see it reflected back from her, like she got struck by the lighting of my emotions. She sucks it in and suddenly she\u2019s overwhelmed too by the fact that the Keurig died a sudden death or that there\u2019s dog hair all over the couch again. She feels it all, man.<\/p>\n

As great as empathy can be, sometimes you need to turn down the volume on the emotive remote, but how do I teach my kid to be a little less empathetic without toughening her too much? Like Goldilocks, what state is \u201cjust right\u201d in the softening of a heart without it bleeding out or turning to stone? New York Magazine would argue\u00a0<\/a>that there is a way to achieve balance between empathy and sympathy and it\u2019s not as tricky as you might think.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You can, in fact, counteract that emotional heartburn and help them so they don\u2019t \u201cspend their days feeling overwhelmed, hurt, and heavyhearted\u201d by other people\u2019s problems. You just have to teach them to convert some of that empathy to sympathy. Practice, as the researchers put it, \u201cIOPT\u201d (imagine-other-perspective-taking) instead of \u201cISPT\u201d (imagine-self-perspective-taking). In other words, show them how to envision themselves in that other person\u2019s shoes, but stop just short of strapping those shoes\u00a0on. They can feel<\/em> for them, but they need not become<\/em> them.<\/p>\n

Spend time instead \u201cfocusing on what the other person is going through without inserting [y]our hypothetical sel[f] into the same situation.\u201d This can create just enough separation to keep the self from crumbling. I believe that this is good practice for adults as well as kids. If you too can\u2019t leave the house without Kleenex or refuse to add anything from the \u201cdrama\u201d category to your Netflix queue because you\u2019re not sure your heart can\u00a0take it, this might be the healthy step back you need.<\/p>\n

So the next time we watch \u201cDumbo\u201d in our house (because there\u2019s always a next time) we will practice feeling sad for that baby elephant without actually becoming<\/em> the baby elephant. Maybe we don\u2019t need to be standing on that high dive with him just now. Instead we can talk about what someone else could have done to help the poor guy out, perhaps given him a ladder, or his mother, or a free ticket out of the circus circuit. In that way, my daughter can become a fighter and not just a crier. She can cry too, of course, but I want her to be able to advocate with her feels rather than be buried under them. That\u2019s the goal anyway. From one empath to another.<\/p>\n

*This article originally appeared on Parent.co.<\/a><\/p>\n

Do you have a kid whose overly empathetic? Are you? How do you protect yourself and the ones you love from all the feels?<\/strong><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everybody touts the benefits of mastering the art of empathy. Feel your feels! It\u2019s true, this\u00a0is crucial. Empathy creates compassion, which fuels activism. It creates a fighter for the bullied, the oppressed, and the underrepresented. It builds a barrier against callousness. It\u2019s the perfect vaccine against jadedness and cynicism. Hence, every parent wants to be an Atticus educating a Scout. We want them to walk in another person\u2019s shoes for a little bit to gain …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[86,26],"tags":[97,310,307,46,209,55,136,63,54,84,100,309,58,308],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mom-gene.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/closing-2197307_1920.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ca5p-O0","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3100"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3351,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3100\/revisions\/3351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}