Empathy and mindfulness facilitate impulse control and make for both kindness and good limit setting.
A range of interventions (meditation, psychotherapy) can boost these, but they involve much hard work, essentially because of our ingrained resistances, which have much to do with the core unsatisfactoriness of human existence (the Buddhist “First Noble Truth”). If it were easier, we would all Dalai Lamas.
However, a good start in life helps a lot. As I have said so often before, developmental neuroscience tells us that “good enough” early nurturance makes for more mindful and compassionate beings. Babies and children find it hard enough to begin this developmental work, even with good nurturers. But various forms of nurturance failure, reactive attachment disorders, make things so much more difficult. Many of our interventions, no matter how well meaning, no matter how necessary, thus come too late.

But one of the lovely things about empathy is that it has a reverberating effect, a fractal “similarity across scale” property.

We recently treated a severely abused young Indigenous woman who was pregnant. A “reflective listening” engagement helped her develop a useful therapeutic alliance, and allowed us in turn to extend this to interactions between her and her new born baby girl. The successful bonding in turn gave the mother further vicarious repair.
We ourselves received support from regular videolinks with a tertiary perinatal service (SWOPS…Google it). This spread across the various members of the team…..midwives, obstetrician, post-natal workers, mental health workers, who could thus “sing from the same page” in their empathic care of the mother and baby.
The mother stopped drinking and using cannabis early on. HER mother, who had a severe drink problem, also gave up (without ANY prompting on our part) so as to be a better supporter for her daughter and grand-daughter. The relatives who used to come to the house and get drunk and violent also moderated themselves, again, without ANY prompting.
Fractal patterns everywhere. Now if ONLY this could spread further. Our politicians perhaps?