Reflective Responding

Since March 20th marked the birthday of Fred Rogers, I was thinking about some of my favorite Mr. Rogers quotes that inform not only my work with children and families, but my own life. One that I return to over and over again is this:

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”

Parents ask me all the time how to approach and talk about feelings at home, and most parents that I speak with want to help their children be able to understand and express their feelings freely and openly. I spoke in a previous blog about how parents can express their own feelings in a healthy way in front of their children, and in this blog, we’ll talk about the other part of that equation: how can parents support children in processing their own feelings?

My favorite tool for this is reflective responding. The beautiful thing about reflective responding is that it’s simple and can be used in communicating with literally anyone in your life, whether having an argument with your spouse or in a meeting with your boss. The difficult thing about it is that it requires mindful and active listening to be successful, which is something that is much easier said than done.

Reflective responding asks us to take our own feelings and judgments out of the equation, to listen with the purpose of understanding. We have to set aside our impulse to problem solve and give advice to respond in this way; it’s not about fixing the problem, but truly and deeply hearing it. It communicates some of the most important messages that we as human beings need to hear: I see you, I hear you, I understand you. 

Imagine being a child and expressing a feeling to a parent, and having them truly understand and empathize with you without trying to provide advice or correct you.  How might that feel?

So, how do we do this? Here’s what it looks like:

Let’s say your child is playing with their sibling, their sibling grabs a toy out of their hand, and they start to cry. A reflective response from the parent might be, “You are feeling angry that your sibling took the toy without asking.” We aren’t placing any kind of judgement on the feeling, we are just naming what IS. On the flip side, let’s say you are picking your child up from school and they bound into the car, immediately chattering about all of the things they did at school. Your reflective response could be, “You are so excited to tell me about your day!”

There are a couple of things to remember with this. First, it’s important to make sure you are matching your child’s energy; it would be confusing and incongruent if you were making a response about a negative emotion in a happy voice or about a positive emotion in a flat tone. Secondly, communicating your understanding via reflective responding does NOT mean that you agree, or that you will fix the problem, or that you are responsible for your child’s feelings. Lastly, when you name the feeling you are inferring from the child’s body language and speech, you may not get it right and that’s okay. What you perceive as anger may actually be fear or worry or some other emotion entirely. Your child may correct you or elaborate in a way that helps you to gain deeper understanding.

This work takes practice, and you will forget, or mess up, or react out of frustration as you are learning this skill. Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect parent. At the end of the day, you are demonstrating to your child that they are important enough to be listened to and seen and considered. You are modeling empathy, which is one of the most important skills for children to learn, so that they become kind and empathic adults.

Remember, as Mr. Rogers says, “feelings are mentionable and manageable.”