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Key points
- Parents of highly sensitive kids struggle to find a balance between supporting and enabling their child.
- Their kids tend to need more support due to their strong reactions to their experiences.
- Their children need empathy, validation, and clear boundaries to help develop strong coping skills.
In families with a highly sensitive child (HSC), one parent—typically the mom—often becomes their child's "emotional support parent" (ESP), the child’s primary and most desired (or demanded) source of comfort. This parent is the person who is highly attuned to her child, keenly focused on anticipating anything that might cause him stress and tirelessly working to head it off.
I hope these insights from my own parenting experience and my work with hundreds of kindred ESPs will be validating and will help you find that important but often elusive sweet spot of supporting vs. enabling your child. In other words, these strategies can help you nurture that special closeness you have with your child, while also setting the important limits that are essential for children’s individuation and healthy, independent functioning far into the future.
Your child needs you to be empathetic—not take on their feelings. This is easier said than done for us ESPs. If our kid gets rejected by a group at the playground, we feel sick to our stomachs. We desperately want to tell those little monsters how mean and exclusive they're being and somehow force them to include our child so they feel accepted. When our child loses it because their block tower keeps falling, we kinesthetically experience their frustration and need to make it go away by rebuilding the structure for them.
Yet when we internalize our children’s feelings and act on them, they sense it. This tends to amplify—not reduce—their distress and ultimately their ability to learn to manage those emotions. Our agitation raises theirs.
What our kids need is for us to tune in to and empathize with their experience, tolerate their distress (as hard as that is), set a limit that helps them move forward, and, when they are open to it, talk about their feelings and experiences and help them think through how they are going to solve their problems.
Avoid being the fixer and focus instead on helping your child become a good problem-solver. ESPs often have a knee-jerk reaction to jump in and fix whatever problem our child is struggling with, especially when they're acting as if it’s a five-alarm fire. We worry that their level of distress must be harmful to them and thus must be alleviated.
And when their distress becomes our distress, we also need relief. This results in Mom-to-the-rescue, unintentionally sending the message that we don’t think our child is capable of mastering the challenges they face and that only we can solve their problems. This fosters the expectation that we, the ESPs, are the ones who should be able to prevent all pain and solve all problems, which quickly turns into a vicious cycle.
Instead of swooping in to save your child, position yourself as their problem-solving partner. Let them know that you have confidence in their ability to solve the challenges they encounter and to do hard things. Make it clear that you will always help them think the issue through and will help them come up with solutions. But you won’t solve their problems for them, because that's their job. (Here's more about nurturing strong problem-solvers.)
What feels “mean” is sometimes loving, and what feels loving is sometimes not what your child needs. Discomfort is uncomfortable. The natural human reaction is to avoid it. But it is working through the stress and discomfort of not getting what we want when we want it, of adapting to a new experience, or of learning a new skill, that leads to self-confidence and growth.
The challenge for us ESPs is that our kids are triggered into discomfort more frequently, quickly, and intensely than other children might be. It takes superhuman self-control not to run to the rescue to provide immediate relief—whether out of fear that the discomfort is somehow harmful to them or because the meltdowns are simply so unpleasant and unbearable. It is generally a lot easier to build resilience in kids who don’t react so fiercely and recover more quickly.
But getting out of their comfort zone, as fiercely as they try to stay glued to it, is critically important for HSCs. Otherwise, their worlds can become very small, limiting their growth opportunities.
What HSCs may not want—but what they do in fact need—is exposure, done sensitively. This means parents creating opportunities for children to face and work through the discomfort, not to enable the avoidance.
The only way kids learn to work through fear is to live through it and see that they survived and can handle it. That's how resilience and grit are developed.
There is no gentle parenting without limits. Limits are loving, even when your child doesn’t like them and melts down in the face of them. It is the lack of limits that makes it hard to be the loving parent you want to be. Limits scaffold adaptation.
They create opportunities for learning to adapt to life's frustrations and disappointments and ultimately lead to fewer meltdowns, more flexibility, and the development of critical coping mechanisms that help kids work through difficult situations. This translates into parents feeling more loving toward their children—the most important result of loving limit-setting.
Less is more when kids are melting down. Parents send me lots of audio/video of meltdown moments with their kids, which often show the ESP making repeated supportive statements, along the lines of, "This is a tough moment. I'm here with you," “This is so tricky. I see you’re so sad. I am sorry you are so unhappy,” to show empathy and acceptance of their child's emotions.
They've gotten the message about the importance of tuning into and validating their child’s feelings to help them learn to manage their emotions. But what's been lost in translation is that often these parents believe that staying present and showing empathy means they need to keep telling their child how much they understand and care about their feelings throughout the entire period their child is upset, or else their child may think that their feelings don't matter and feel abandoned by you.
In reality, what I see in these encounters is that in the heat of the moment, this approach backfires, causing more, not less, stress. The child’s brain is flooded with cortisol (a stress hormone) and they can’t process what their parents are saying. All that input feels overwhelming and increases their dysregulation.
The more the parent makes these statements, especially when they are naming specific emotions that they imagine their child is feeling, "I know, you're really angry," the more they escalate: "I am not angry."
When children are in this "red zone," less is more. Repeating an empathic statement does not make you more empathetic. Acknowledging your child's distress one time, and then being a quiet, calm presence until the storm passes, is often what is most loving. This lets your child know that you understand and accept their feelings, are not judging them, are not angry or frustrated, and, that you have confidence that they can work through this difficult moment and that they don't need you to try to make it all better. They just need you to be their rock.
Last week, an ESP—whose endless empathy approach was backfiring—told me that she landed on a brilliant plan with her four-year-old HSC. When he is in the throes of a major meltdown, she guides him into his room and puts on classical music that they listen to silently. This is what calms him and then he is ready to move on.
Another mom had a child who was exploding at her at school pick-up, complaining that she came too early, didn’t bring the right snack, and made the car seat too tight—it was "squeezing" her. She screamed and hurled venom.
This mom had been admonishing her daughter for her behavior at the same time she tried to reason with her, and also did a lot of validating, repeatedly, about how hard this was. Her daughter just escalated.
Then, Mom made a shift. She would say one empathetic statement about how it’s hard to go from school to home, and then as calmly as possible, help her child into the car. She put on her daughter’s favorite music and didn’t react to the venom. Within two days her child was much more regulated when leaving school. Responding in this way has been a game-changer for many ESPs in my practice.
