When we hear our child scream in pain for the knock she's taken on the knee, we feel empathy, compassion, and concern.

When we hear our child scream in pain for the unmet unreasonable demand, we feel resentment, anger, and loss of patience.

Why do we feel justified in our different feelings? What makes the two circumstances any different? From the child's perspective its all the same: pain is felt. One is physical pain that stems from a physical wound, the other is emotional that pain stems from a perceived wound to the heart.

We label the child's unreasonable demand, "selfish" and then feel justified in minimizing, even perhaps dismissive of her feelings.

The child does not know the difference between selfish and unselfish. She does not know how to choose healthier desires over less healthy desires, so we must provide feedback, it is unfortunate that we often choose unhealthy feedback.

I'm talking of course about the minimizing and dismissive reactions we have to the child's crying. This accomplishes our goal, but unfortunately teaches the child how to be dismissive of people's "selfish" or "irrational" pain. The whole world becomes a bit harder, a bit less compassionate.

It would be better if we could feel as if the child has just slipped and skinned a knee. That is actually what happened, the child slipped up and banked on a desire that can't be fulfilled. The cessation of expectation of fulfillment must be learned. That's a painful thing for an ego to go through, no?

We, as a race, need more empathy and compassion and we need less judgemental attitude.

We need to teach that to our children by example, starting with our response to their cries over painful boo boos.