authoritative parenting Archives – Empathetic Parenting

Introduction

So far there is no definitive parenting style for highly sensitive children. There are several well-known styles of parenting that are used as reference points by many parents – authoritative parenting, authoritarian, permissive, attachment, neglectful, supportive, etc. You may have heard of these, and have decided to practice some or a mixture. Each has its particular set of characteristics, and some overlap. Many are a combination of the degree of limits or boundaries, demands, expectations, love, connection, support, understanding, tolerance, permission, or guidance.

People have strong views about what is right, and many people’s views are based on what they themselves experienced in childhood. However, they often blindly repeat what they experienced thinking this is the way to parents. Or they boldly do the opposite never wanting to subject their child to what they went through. Arguably neither response is ideal unless they had amazing parents and are totally well-balanced happy individuals!

The complexities of a highly sensitive child shift the whole issue of parenting completely when you take into account what a highly sensitive child needs, how they function, and what they can’t tolerate. It can’t only be a decision about how the parents want to do it and what suits them – it also needs to be about what will support the child. Highly sensitive children will be very difficult to handle unless they get the appropriate treatment – as you will undoubtedly have realised! Many of these parenting styles simply won’t work for reasons specific to the child’s nervous system.

When parents have a highly sensitive child they often don’t know much of this information at the beginning, so it can be a very steep learning curve. They can feel alone, unsupported, and isolated when things that work for other parents simply fail. I’m attempting to simplify the broad strokes here to save you time and help you orient yourself to the task at hand.

The authoritative approach versus supportive parenting styles

These are two seemingly alternate poles of a spectrum – or are they? This is the question we will be investigating here.

“I think my wife is being too soft on the kids and she needs to toughen up” is an exemplary statement of the tension between the poles. This is a comment I hear so often (and also the other way around) – from mothers telling me how they are trying to parent with love and understanding for their highly sensitive child, and their partner just doesn’t seem to get it.

I feel it is worth unpacking what is behind this dynamic as it contains the potential for increased understanding and growth for both partners. It can offer a way of thinking and talking about the differences in approach so that couples can come to an understanding and work together to support and grow their children, rather than wasting vital energy in conflict.

Basic Decisions – What are you actually trying to do as a parent?

This is a good question to ask yourself if you are the guardian of a young partially formed human. Are you trying to teach a set of essential and learned life skills? Or are you trying to support and develop an innate sense of self with unique interests and capabilities – or both? Have you noticed that your child was already quite a particular person since birth and that their preferences, talents, and leanings are only getting more definite over time? Do you feel you want to support and draw them out or do you feel uncomfortable with the way they are?

Are there certain things about your child you find totally unacceptable? Do you feel you need to correct them or stamp them out? How do you think this will work for you in terms of your relationship with the child and their trust? What is more important to you – having the child’s earnt trust and continued respect or your child behaving in certain correct and appropriate ways in all situations, and “doing well”?

Parenting through Fear versus Connection – different parenting styles but please make it a conscious choice

There is a fundamental distinction between parenting through fear (i.e. using anger and coercion) vs parenting through love and connection. The key question to ask yourself here is which form did you mostly experience yourself, and how did it feel? To explore this, maybe ask yourself if you felt emotionally safe with your parents. Did you feel heard, loved, and supported? Were you taught how to identify and name your own emotions at all? Did you feel safe enough to tell your parents how you felt, or what you wanted or needed? When you reflect on your experience and the residues it left, how would you like your child primarily to feel about you? If you answer inwardly that you would like them to trust you without a doubt, then you need to really take the next paragraph on board.

If you list and consider the people in your life who you really like, they will probably all have a common denominator – whether you realise it or not. They had warmth. You felt that they liked you. This feeling that some people transmit can actually be broken down into a number of components that you can learn and do actively. The basics include listening, accepting, and feeling another through the heart.

Empathy or a willingness to understand the other – which may include asking questions to elicit more information – is part of the second layer. It doesn’t mean agreeing with everything, but it does mean listening properly so the other feels heard and accepted. Humour can often be part of the connection that creates a sense of common knowledge or aim. And lastly, a supportive function, where the person remembers where you are up to in your learning or activity, senses what you need next, and generally guides you in that direction without you even realising.

These are practical qualities that comprise active love. I don’t feel that they are gender specific. They can be practiced by either gender or any age. So, whether you are a father or a mother you have the opportunity to work on creating a connection with your children, and also with your partner, one that feels warm, that generates trust, and over time creates safety for expression and security.

A common experience of the shift to more conscious parenting – First steps – Acceptance

The connected, love and trust-based way of parenting that puts making the child feel accepted and safe at the center belongs more to supportive parenting models and attachment parenting, although it also plays a role in authoritative parenting. I will suggest later it is possible to create love and connection, and still set clear limits that come from an embodied place that parents can understand…

Usually when a mother has been working with me for a few sessions she has begun to get a good grasp of the total acceptance and the highly sensitive approach that her highly sensitive child needs just to complete very simple tasks adequately. I’m referring to having breakfast, getting dressed, and going to school. These can be major achievements.

By this time the mother has usually been through a process of understanding her child’s need to feel and talk about every one of their experiences in detail, and not to rush or skip anything or her children get overwhelmed and disconnect. This often leads to a tantrum or breakdown that is way more time-consuming than being a bit more patient in the first instance. This builds motivation to be patient as a habitual attitude.

So mothers have learned to be patient, accept, encourage, and track and understand their child’s emotional and mental processes in detail. They accompany their child on a feeling level in so many ways, right down to pre-empting a drop in blood sugar by providing a snack before it happens – they are really present with them a lot of the time. I have also worked with single fathers who do this very effectively.

Second Steps – The deeper spiritual work of parenting – Support

In order to do this they have to learn to deal with their own frustrations – which often arise from realising that parts of themselves never got the kind of caring attention they are now giving to their child. And that really hurts. So there is a grieving process that goes on side by side with learning to parent the sensitive child. It’s one of discovery and learning that can be extremely healing and affirming to a sensitive parent who was never fully acknowledged for their internal experiences. And yet it can be very painful. When pain comes up the instinct to lash out in anger can be strong.

And at the beginning mothers learn to experience this anger directly as a sensation and not to confuse it with anything to do with their child. This requires support which they often seek in weekly one on one sessions with me. They learn to regulate their own emotions once triggered – that is to bring them back within a manageable range where they can function and respond.

Once this process has progressed a while and the mother becomes more integrated, she usually learns to put aside her anger and stay calm, to deal with the anger or trigger in a separate space in her own time alone. Crucial for parenting a highly sensitive child – she learns how to separate her own reactions when an emotion is triggered from her responses to the child – by using her own inner body sensation as a child. So then she is able to focus more directly on what is actually going on with her children and accompany them in their struggles and explorations so that they don’t feel alone, overwhelmed, or generally anxious. This makes for a much smoother and less tantrum/drama–filled parenting experience with fewer ups and downs.

The other pole – Authority and Structure

Fathers often don’t capture the intricate and delicate work that is going on at home during the day because they don’t witness it. This is just the result of a division of labour, not a value judgment or criticism. I’m going to generalise here for the sake of being concise, but I don’t mean to offend anyone or stereotype. We’re just trying to get to some deeper dynamics and understand.

The working father who comes home for dinner often hasn’t witnessed the dozen minor struggles and major wins the mother or child has had throughout a normal day. From negotiating breakfast to getting dressed to even getting in the car, to getting a crying child to go through the school gate, etc. Then there are the explosive meltdowns on returning home, the fights over screen time and inevitably someone who wanted something totally different for dinner than what is available.

In addition, the father may be exhausted, preoccupied by practical or financial worries, and sometimes also upset that he misses so much of their children’s actual day-to-day growing up. The archetypal nature of masculinity is to be the guiding force, the intuitive vision, heartfelt protection, material provision and so on, and also to hold an overview. He has the bigger picture in his mind, whilst the woman deals with more of the home details. It can be really hard to switch levels or modes constantly, even when you want to.

This is an archetype, not a stereotype, and with this archetype (which also lives within women, but is not their primary domain) comes structure, expectation, and achievement. Expecting and demanding that their children be able to function according to society’s rules, standards and goals is normal and healthy for fathers. It is also part of the premise of authoritative parenting, where children are gently guided towards clearly defined standards, expectations, and behavioural demands for their own benefit.

Often this is what the father is in part expressing when he explodes because a child can’t or won’t perform a certain task when required. He knows instinctively that the child needs to learn to do certain things in a certain way just like other people. His anger is triggered by frustration and a lack of understanding of why their child cannot do this. I’m realising as I write this, that mothers and women can and do express this pole equally as hopes for how their child will develop and who they will be – only since mothers usually approach me for help first, their partners often appear more authoritative by contrast. I’d like to suggest that their authoritative instinct is valid, but their way of going about expressing this is often counterproductive.

What Dumping Anger Does to a Highly Sensitive Child

A small highly sensitive child can’t understand a word you are saying when you shout at them. All they hear is noise. And what they feel is something like their energy field being shattered or hit. Shouting and anger feel like a full-on attack. What they take away from it is that they are wrong or bad. Not that their behaviour was lacking.

As a highly sensitive adult, I can confirm that this is the case, and even more so for a child. Being shouted at can feel like physical blows and is traumatic. And that definitely destroys rather than builds trust, and is physically shocking. I don’t think that any parent deliberately sets out to achieve this. However, this is what results when you lose it in the heat of the moment and dump your anger on your child. If you previously thought that when your child misbehaves or is naughty you are perfectly entitled to yell at them, you might want to reconsider.

If you have already realised that your anger is nearly always counterproductive, then the next step is logically to look at your own frustration in order to turn the energy into something more constructive for your child. There may be two things lurking inside it that you can start to disentangle. One is annoyance and frustration with yourself that you don’t know how to get through to the child to make them understand. They seem unfathomable and very emotionally whimsical to you. (That’s where the wanting them to toughen up comes in).

Yet what you are in fact maybe looking for is a way to connect and understand. It hurts that you don’t know how. And the other is the pain that arises when you realise that you didn’t receive this kind of gentle acceptance and support for yourself when you were little. And part of you would really have liked it! This tends to bring up a strong resistance to giving it to your child – however, if your child is highly sensitive you won’t get far without making these changes. And when you do you will be so relieved! So it is worth persisting and delving into the unknown.

How to stop shouting and start communicating

A very simple analogy may help you to start to look at things differently. When your car won’t go, does it work to kick your car in the door and swear? No. Most men would patiently get out, open the bonnet and have a good look around. What is it that appears to be smoking, disconnected, or lacking? They would run a series of basic systematic tests, establish what the problem is and then resolve it. This is an example of the same frustration put to useful creative, productive use. A child is not a mechanical machine, but really the approach isn’t so different. It just requires getting to grips with a different set of components – the emotions.

When your child is blowing up or refusing to do something and you get angry, it’s a good idea to stop yourself from reacting. This can take time to master – however you can choose to sense your own frustration, own it as yours, and if it’s already raging out of control, take yourself away until you calm down. If you possibly can, you catch it early, get out of your adult car as it were, and change mode into problem-solving.

Only first of all, you have to get yourself very calm, centered, and caring. That’s when you open the bonnet and have a curious look around. Drop your defenses and have a look at your child – what is going on here? Ask yourself why your child is upset. There can be a dozen emotions and unmet needs behind an angry outburst. First of all, you can assume that they are not doing it deliberately to annoy you – this is mostly unlikely. Can you feel what is really going on here? Are they sad? Scared? Tired? Hungry? Did something happen at school? If you have a hunch, check it out by asking the child if they are X because of Z… They will mostly answer, and if you get a No, just try again. Offering a hug may work.

Your willingness to relate, to talk, and to find out what the matter is will create the connection that is the foundation of everything else you ever want your child to learn or achieve. It is SO important! And you may get a dozen opportunities every single day to create this. It can be fun to think of it lightheartedly as doing detective work. Negotiating a solution through asking questions, listening, offering comfort, action, and resolution is the way. There are no rules – this is something the two of you work out in the relationship. The key is dropping aggression and blame, and taking up willingness and gentleness.

How to Balance Support and Connection with Authority and Structure

A common source of disagreement for parents is when one parent is discovering that her child’s feelings and needs are very deep and can’t be ignored, and the other is not. Once they realise that when they accept and help the child navigate their inner world, they develop happily and in an organic way where they stay connected with themselves, and a light goes on. They see fewer dramas and fights, and a more confident functional child.

Sometimes it is hard to explain these subtleties to the other partner. Their way of feeling and connecting with the child may feel very soft or permissive to the other partner, who thinks the child needs to toughen up to live in the real world. So often I hear frustrated fathers talking about their children just needing to be able to get on with certain things, or just do it, when the mother is holding back, sensing that the child doesn’t want to or isn’t ready. The fathers are not wrong, only the way to get the desired outcome might require quite a lot of what the mother is already doing, as we have discussed above.

I feel that both perspectives are valuable. The mother is onto something in the sense that children take time to develop – and given support and space they will often try and master activities and situations that they initially refuse to engage. They expand and develop as their sense of trust grows, and the mother holds space for the child to venture out and come back to safety.

The father’s perspective also contains a valuable standard or expectation that the child be able to do something simple and straightforward that is asked of them without drama. In the workplace men need to perform a lot of different tasks without emotional resistance daily just to get by and earn a living. So the father’s role may be to nudge the child out into the world a little past their comfort zone. Yet this nudging doesn’t need to be done forcefully. It’s all in the tone of voice and language. Not surprisingly, many animals in nature demonstrate the balance between the two well as they educate their offspring…

So now we are back at the authoritative pole, the vision and the leadership or guidance which I also feel is crucial for highly sensitive children, and even more so maybe than a more average child. Highly sensitive children can appear to be repeatedly very shy and hold back. Some parents fall into the trap of overprotection, and this denies the child the chance to conquer their own fears and grow. However, when you know them well you can also gage the moment to push them a little out of their comfort zone, and then they can really surprise you and themselves by how much they grow and progress without tears. How do you balance the support and the nudge forwards? I feel that the art of truly exceptional and excellent parenting lies in an exploration of this question. I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer.

Whether each parent takes one role – one does the connecting and the other holds the vision of milestones, expectations, etc. Or both parents connect and set limits, the real skill is in knowing when to be gentle, connect, and empathise, and when to stand firm, ask for more from them and not take tantrums as an answer. This is where having two parents not just one person gives a wider perspective of the child that to some extent can counter personal blind spots and imbalances.

If the child is having a particularly emotional or tired day then some lenience will be needed in the usual limits. However too much, and the child may spiral out of control and learn to use this as a tactic. Similarly, on a day when the child is obviously creating drama just for the sake of it, you make need to stick to clearer standards or boundaries without engaging and ignore the ensuing drama. So how do you know when to do what?

Embodied Parenting – the Ugraded Parenting Principle

The only way that I personally know for making these tough calls is to use the bodily sense of what is required. I find that my body responds with frustration when a child or partner crosses a line. The parents I work with who have learned to put their own reactions aside and use their embodied parenting skills have also reported that they get clear indications from their sensations when to concede and when to stand firm. Their awareness even gives them new strategies and creative solutions in situations where they have previously been stuck.

So learning to make use of the body in parenting is an absolutely invaluable tool that can keep you sane and anchored in a seemingly endless world of upsets and demands where drama is the king! It’s also far more useful than rigid rules because no two children or parents are alike, and using embodied responses works for unexpected and unfamiliar situations too without having to consult a manual! It provides appropriate and clear limits on tap once you get used to the way it works. And most importantly because the limits are authentic and connected rather than abstract and head-based, highly sensitive children will easily accept and respond to them. If you are interested in learning more about these principles, then please send me a message and I will be happy to provide more information.

The Additional benefits of connective parenting with the added element of embodied wisdom – and why it is so crucial for HS Children

There are certain very crucial advantages for the child’s development to you learning to connect and empathise. Mothers – or the mainly connecting parent – will often realise this early on. They will see the gradual growth and learning in the child. This may include periodic willingness to try new things, and also certain withdrawals from things already mastered if the child is having an off day, or there is another unknown factor. Having learned to trust the child and their responses, the mother may be more able to be flexible in her expectations. What this does is give the child space to learn to trust and stay true to their own instincts and feelings, even when they cannot necessarily say why.

Well, so what? You may wonder – as many fathers do before they get it fully. The crucial point here is that highly sensitive children are all about their emotions and their inner world. So if you push or force them to go against their own bodily and gut instinct to meet your demands you necessarily make them disconnect from themselves. Then the very emotions which could guide their experience toward meeting their own needs are denied or thrown into confusion. Their whole inner navigation system – which I call the Inner Compass – disconnects.

Instead of trusting that hesitancy or doubt means, no, wait, and that joy and energy mean yes – go, they spin around in circles in their heads, and either look confused, cling, cry, or meltdown. Nobody likes or tolerates a clingy, insecure, seemingly wimpy child who won’t try anything or have fun. However, that is what you get when you inadvertently sabotage their confidence by getting angry!

Children need to develop their sense of security and emotional connection in a safe way at an appropriate pace for them. It can take years for a highly sensitive child to develop this trust and security, but when they get it they are phenomenal and fascinating individuals. Many people don’t know about high sensitivity so they can’t even guess what is going on. But once you have observed how this works for yourself with your child you can’t really go back.

This is the only way that really works. Anything else seems to lead to malfunction on all levels – because if the emotions and sense of confidence are out of whack, usually sleep and eating is affected too, along with learning and physical growth. So, having their emotional needs met is arguably a close second for highly sensitive children to physical needs, if you want to avoid years of pain and expensive therapy later on.

How to agree on a parenting style for an HS Child

If you’ve read this article and know that your way isn’t working with your child, you are probably realising that the high sensitivity has something to do with it. You can read the blog on the basics of what highly sensitive children need to function here if you want a better understanding. If you are a non-sensitive parent who thinks the child should toughen up, then you have a few more options now that might help you and your partner parent with more support for each other. You could, for example, observe your partner in action and see how it works. Does it work? Do the children respond better to the connective supportive approach? Your own observation cannot deceive you, even if you don’t accept or believe what I have written. Maybe go and try it out for yourself…

If you feel that you will never understand what your child needs and what they are going through – and you are right, you may not, then maybe leave that part of things to your partner who does get it. And trust that they know what they are doing…

There is nothing wrong with a division of roles or labour, and not everybody has to be the same. Whether you have similar or very different parenting styles, what you want to avoid are conflicting messages and impulses because they confuse the child. There is nothing wrong with your having high expectations for your child as long as you don’t get angry when they haven’t met them yet. Holding a vision can be extremely supportive because everyone thrives on being believed in. The fact that you may not be able to fill in the gaps doesn’t matter if someone else can help your child take the learning steps they need to get there.

Apologising is crucial for trust and connection

Your partner and your child need to feel your basic respect in order to trust you – which includes not raging at them. If and when someone in the family explodes – and we all lose it sometimes – then apologising as soon as you can is a good idea. The longer you leave things generally the harder they are to put right. When you’ve calmed down, try to make it your priority to apologise for the anger because highly sensitive people experience it as devastating – but are also quick to forgive if you own your mistake fully and they can feel you are sincere.

Conclusion

Whatever your own starting point when you began reading this, hopefully, you have found one or more aspects of the parenting challenges that you can relate to. My aim here is to increase understanding of parenting highly sensitive children, stimulate creative solutions and experimentation, and give you and your partner a shared vocabulary to be able to discuss difficulties you are facing in agreeing on a coherent parenting style. What I have written here is not a definitive truth, but rather extractions from my own observations of what can work.

If you relate to explosive angry reactions and know that you have unresolved pain, then you could contact me or another practitioner to work through and clear these issues and be more available for your child. There is no shame in realising that there are things you don’t know either about yourself or your child and exploring answers.

Children are often here to show their parents both their unconscious emotions and habits and to reflect back on their unique qualities and strengths. If you are struggling with this but know it’s true, then maybe consider doing some embodiment work to learn to sense yourself more as a way of relating with your child.

The more you do the work of learning to connect and relate the more you will also grow and learn. It can be a wonderful experience if you don’t expect yourself to be perfect at the beginning and allow yourself to make mistakes. Your children will forgive you a thousand times as long as you keep connecting with them and building trust. And when you grow your understanding of what makes them tick you will also increase your motivation to connect with them on more and more sensitive levels, which will light them up! Enjoy the process – there is no manual so you can’t get it wrong. And whenever you connect more there will be immediately tangible changes.