Empathy, the second part of a parent’s emotional caretaking job, refers to our ability to understand and relate to the feelings of another person, and our desire to do that comes from the assumption that someone else’s feelings are in fact valid. So, validation comes first (“My child is having a real emotional experience”) and empathy second (“I can try to understand and connect with these feelings in my child, not make them go away”). Empathy comes from our ability to be curious: it allows us to explore our child’s emotional experience from a place of learning, not judgment.
