I’m not a born mathematician, but trying to help my 12 year old with his homework has made me SO pleased that I don’t have to do secondary school in 2026; I’m staggered by the complexity of what he’s expected to understand.

Today’s musings aren’t about homework though. 
They’re about how we handle it when our children have a problem, and what we can miss when we give in to the fierce urge to solve it for them.

Even with a relatively shallow subject like school work, this is how it’s been playing out in my house… 

It’s all done online, so the only way to complete it is to get every answer right.
So when my child can’t, like most kids, he naturally asks me to summon up the answer. 
His expectation becomes my expectation: Fix it, fix, it, fix it…

This is familiar territory for most parents, and the source of our children’s struggles is often much deeper than homework frustrations; feeling excluded, humiliated, defeated, guilty, angry, sad, ashamed; the list goes on. 

So problem-solving mode kicks in.
We feel like we’re connected with those feelings because we’re helping them;

“We can fix it”
“There’s no need to cry”
“It’s going to be ok”
“It will all blow over”
“There’s nothing to worry about”
And the age-old chestnut, “Calm down” (Since when, in the history of humankind, has ‘calm down’ helped anyone to calm down?) 

But, while there’s a time and place for these responses, when stuck in big feelings or distress, rarely are they what any of us – child or adult – need in the moment. 

Whatever version of ‘making things better’ we offer, if we’re more connected to our need to take their discomfort away than their experience, that’s not empathy.

As emotions researcher Brene Brown states “Empathy is vulnerable choice, because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling”. 

In other words, being empathic means being able to sit with our own discomfort.

That may bring our own stuff to the surface, e.g. your child struggling to make friends in a new school may be painful for you too, if it means recalling being that kid yourself.

Maybe we end up triggered; it can be hard not to, when our children stress over the kinds of problems most people in the world can only dream of.

And often, it’s reliable parent guilt that steers us away from empathic connection and back to the familiarity of  ‘Just make this feeling stop – for me, and them’.

In three minutes, this video by Brene Brown explains the power of empathy more beautifully than I can in this post.

But whether you watch it or not, here’s an invitation…

Next time your child presents you with an emotional discomfort, even when they’re in ‘fix it’ mode, pause…

Recognise, but resist, the urge to solve it. Not necessarily forever, but ask yourself what your child really needs from you in that moment.

Because here’s what happened when I got over my need to just get the homework in. 

I saw a kid who needed me to acknowledge that not being able to skip that question or ask his teacher for help was unfair.
That he was right to be frustrated that his time was being hijacked by a pointless algebra question. 

Him knowing that I saw and heard him, I believed him and I ‘got it’, did far more powerful work than had I just got the calculator out in ‘reliable mum’ fashion.  

Choose empathy, even when it’s difficult. Because empathy makes ‘I see you, I hear you, I believe you, I get it’ enough.

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