Close your eyes for a moment.
Think back to when you were seven years old. Or five. Or ten.
What did the world feel like from that height? What did it feel like to be small in a world built for people twice your size? To have feelings that were too big for your words? To want something desperately and not know how to ask for it?
What did you need from the adults around you — that you did not always get?
Now open your eyes.
That child you just remembered — they are standing in front of you. Not you, of course. Your child. A different person, a different time, a different set of gifts and struggles and needs.
But a child. Fully, entirely, completely a child.
And what they need from you is not so different from what you needed then.
This blog is an invitation. Not to a programme or a technique. To a perspective — one that research shows is one of the most powerful tools a parent can develop.
The ability to see the world through your child’s eyes.
What Research Tells Us — The Science of Parental Empathy
The ability to understand and share the feelings of your child — what researchers call parental empathy — is not simply a nice quality to have.
Research has shown that parental empathy is positively associated with childhood attachment security and emotional openness. Parents with strong empathy provide their children with a safe foundation from which children can explore their emotional experiences and seek comfort when experiencing distress.
In practical terms: the parent who genuinely tries to understand what their child is experiencing — who asks “what is this like for them?” rather than “why won’t they just listen?” — is building something that research identifies as the single most important factor in healthy child development:
A secure attachment.
And a child who is securely attached — who feels genuinely understood by their parent — is a child who is more confident, more emotionally regulated, more resilient, and more willing to cooperate.
Not because they were made to. But because they feel safe enough to.
Research across three generations found that parents’ empathic and sensitive responses to children’s distress serve as a model for children’s supportive responses to others — building empathy, prosocial behaviour, and emotional intelligence across generations.
When you understand your child — you are teaching them to understand others.
The Generation That Remembers — And Chooses Differently
Here is something worth sitting with honestly:
Most of us were not raised by parents who had access to the research, the awareness, or the language that we have today.
Our parents did the best they could — with what they knew, in the circumstances they were in, with the tools their own parents gave them. This is not a criticism. It is a fact. And it deserves to be held with gratitude and compassion.
But today, something has shifted.
We know more. Research has given us understanding that previous generations simply did not have. And with that knowledge comes a choice — a real, conscious, deliberate choice — that our parents did not have in the same way:
We can choose to understand our children in ways that we were not always understood.
Not because our parents failed. But because we know more now. Because we have access to research that they did not. Because we live in a time when the connection between a parent’s empathy and a child’s wellbeing has been measured, documented, and confirmed.
And because — if we are honest — we remember what it felt like to be young and not fully understood. And we do not want that for our children.
This is the bridge generation’s gift. The knowledge to do something different. Not better than our parents — differently. For our children.
What You Actually Remember — The Childhood Your Body Knows
There is a kind of knowing that research calls embodied memory — the felt sense of past experience that lives not just in the mind, but in the body. The tightening in the chest when someone raises their voice. The warmth that comes from being genuinely praised. The shrinking that happens when someone compares you unfavourably to another child.
You carry these memories — even if you cannot name them — and they shape how you respond to your own child in ways you may not always recognise.
When your child cries at bedtime and you feel frustration — part of that frustration may be your own unprocessed memory of being told to stop crying.
When your child insists on doing something their own way and you feel the urge to override them — part of that impulse may be rooted in the years you spent doing things someone else’s way.
And when you kneel down to their level, look them in the eye, and say “I can see this is really hard for you” — that moment of genuine empathy — it heals something. In them, yes.
But sometimes also in you.
The Exercise — Live a Day in Their Shoes
This is not a thought experiment. It is a practice. A real, deliberate, daily practice of shifting perspective.
Ask yourself — regularly, honestly:
“What is this like for my child right now?”
Not “why are they doing this?”
Not “what do I need to do to stop this?”
But simply: “What is this like for them?”
What does the world look like at their height?
Everything is bigger. Adults are taller, louder, faster. Decisions are made above their heads — about their lives, their days, their bodies — without their input. They are expected to comply with rules they did not help create, to manage emotions they do not yet have the neural equipment to fully regulate, to sit still in environments not designed for their bodies.
What do they feel that they cannot say?
Research consistently shows that young children’s emotional vocabulary is limited — not because they do not feel deeply, but because the words for those feelings have not yet arrived. The tantrum is not manipulation. It is a child who is overwhelmed, who does not have the language, and who is doing the only thing available to them.
What do they need that they have not asked for?
Often: presence. Not solutions. Not instruction. Not redirection. Simply — someone sitting beside them, not trying to fix them, but being genuinely, warmly, fully there.
What Changes When You Remember
When a parent genuinely remembers what it felt like to be a child — and uses that memory as a lens through which to see their own child — something shifts in how they respond.
They pause before they react.
Because they remember what it felt like to have an adult react without pausing.
They explain instead of simply commanding.
Because they remember what it felt like to be commanded without explanation.
They get on the floor.
Because they remember what it felt like when an adult came down to their level — and how different that felt from looking up at someone standing over them.
They celebrate small things.
Because they remember how enormous the small things felt when they were young — and how much it mattered when someone noticed.
They say “I understand” — and mean it.
Because they remember how rare and precious it was when someone did.
How Charades Makes This Visible
Charades is one of the most powerful tools a family has for practicing the perspective-shift this blog describes.
When a parent plays charades with their child:
- 🎭 They enter the child’s world — on the child’s terms
- 👀 They watch how their child thinks — how they express, how they observe, how they process
- 😂 They laugh together — as equals, not as authority and subject
- ❤️ They discover something — perhaps something they did not know about their child before
And in that discovery — in the twenty minutes of being genuinely present, genuinely curious, genuinely delighted by who their child is — something happens that all the parenting research in the world points toward:
The child feels seen. And a child who feels seen is a child who is safe.
A Final Word — The Memory That Changes Everything
Before you go to sleep tonight — think of one moment from your own childhood when you felt genuinely seen. Genuinely understood. Genuinely safe.
Who was there? What did they do? What did they say — or not say?
Now think of your child.
They are at the beginning of building exactly those memories. The ones they will carry for the rest of their lives. The ones they will return to when life is hard, when they need to remember that they are loved.
You are in those memories right now. Being built into them. Today.
What do you want them to remember about how it felt to be with you?
That is your answer. That is your guide.
Live a day in their shoes — and let what you remember make you the parent they will never forget.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is parental empathy and why does it matter?
Parental empathy is the capacity to understand and share your child’s emotional experience — to genuinely ask “what is this like for them?” Research shows that parental empathy is directly associated with secure attachment, stronger emotional regulation, greater social competence, and lower rates of emotional and behavioural problems in children. It is one of the most powerful predictors of healthy child development available to parents.
How does remembering my own childhood help me as a parent?
Our childhood experiences are stored as embodied memories — felt senses that shape how we instinctively respond to our own children. When we consciously return to what it felt like to be young — what we needed, what hurt, what helped — we develop a perspective that makes us more responsive, more patient, and more genuinely present. Research confirms that parents who practise perspective-taking raise children with stronger empathy and better emotional outcomes.
Is parental empathy learned or innate?
Research shows that while some people may find empathy more natural than others, parental empathy is a skill that can be developed. Studies show that parents who intentionally practise perspective-taking — who consciously ask what their child is experiencing — show measurable improvements in their empathic responses over time. It is not fixed. It grows with practice.
What does it mean to “live a day in your child’s shoes”?
It means regularly asking “what is this like for my child right now?” — not to excuse behaviour, but to understand it. It means remembering the felt sense of being young: the bigness of feelings, the smallness of having no control, the importance of being genuinely seen. This perspective shift does not make parenting easier — but it makes it more human. And more effective.
How does charades support parental empathy and child connection?
Charades creates a context where parents enter their child’s world — playing on the child’s terms, discovering how their child thinks and expresses, laughing together as equals. Research on serve-and-return interaction shows that this kind of genuine, mutual engagement is one of the most powerful builders of the parent-child connection that empathy depends on. In twenty minutes of charades, a parent and child can build more genuine understanding than hours of parallel co-existence.