My son was near tears when I picked him up from school the other day, barely able to contain his sorrow long enough to walk to the car, where he could break down in relative privacy.

Run-in with a bully, I wondered? Tragedy in a classmate's family? Internal organ damage sustained during gym class?

“My halo disc didn't come,” he sobbed.

“Your what?”

“My halo disc!” he repeated. “It was supposed to come and it didn't come!”

He earned a halo disc — like a Frisbee, only cheaper — during his school's fundraiser, and it was running late, his first-grade teacher had explained to him. It would probably arrive the following day. No biggie.

Except it was totally a biggie.

My instinct in these situations is to gently point out to my child that he — or she (at 10, my daughter is not above tantrums) — is failing to see the big picture.

The halo disc will still arrive, Bud, just a little later! Plus, you have 4,782 other toys at home to play with in the meantime! One of them might even be a halo disc, for all we know! And think of all that we have to be grateful for! Food, shelter, loving family members! Is it really worth losing your marbles over a halo disc?

This time, though, I went with it.

“Oh, man,” I said. “That is the worst! You were so excited about that thing!”

“I know!” he wailed.

“And then it just doesn't show up?” I said. “Seriously! That's the worst!”

“I know,” he said, growing a little bored. “Can I have a piece of gum?”

Wait, what? That's it? We're skipping the rending-of-garments phase?

I decided I was onto something. For the next few days I started agreeing with my kids about their feelings, no matter how badly I wanted to point out, gently, that they were being ridiculous ingrates.

And it worked. Every time. They aired their grievances, I heard their grievances. They moved on.

I called Katie Hurley, a child and adolescent psychotherapist and author of “The Happy Kid Handbook: How to Raise Joyful Children in a Stressful World” (TarcherPerigee), to get her take.

Is this wise, what I'm doing? Or am I raising young narcissists with no ability to match their emotions to the gravity of the situation?

“The thing no one ever tells parents is that a tiny bit of empathy can go a long way toward helping kids feel heard,” Hurley said.

All day long, she said, kids are being told what to do — by parents, teachers, coaches. Very few of those adults have (or take) the time to kneel down every time something goes wrong and say, “I get it. That's really hard.”

A few days of holding their chins up during a series of setbacks and letdowns, and suddenly our kids are sobbing over halo discs.

“Kids very often don't feel heard and understood,” Hurley said. “When we meet them where they are — ‘That's really hard' — their response is, ‘Oh, wow. Somebody gets me.' You're not fixing it for them and you're not going to change the thing that happened, but you understand it feels hard and you allow them to be upset.”

Hurley said parents often fear this approach will backfire: “If I give them permission to feel, does that mean they're going to feel out loud all the time?”

It doesn't.

“The truth is, they turn around and show empathy and kindness in return,” she said. “They learn, ‘It felt good when mom understood me.' And they learn to say, ‘I know how you feel.' We need to reduce our own fears about ‘What am I raising?' and say to ourselves, ‘I'm raising a kid who knows what it feels like to be understood.'?”

And if we want to raise them with perspective — the ability to feel gratitude for their food and shelter and the realization that halo discs don't breed true happiness — we need to live that example daily.

“Instead of saying, ‘You're upset I didn't get you a hot chocolate? That guy hasn't eaten in three days!' ” Hurley said, “keep a jar in the kitchen for spare change and after three months donate it. When kids are calm, that's the time to talk about homelessness and hunger and what we can do about global issues. That's when they will want to make a difference. If we throw all that at them when they're upset, they can't even hear it.”

This is life-changing advice for me. And it seems pretty simple, doesn't it?

No pressure to find the magic combination of words that will both stop the tantrum in its tracks and prevent another from occurring. Just listen. And empathize. Like you'd do with a friend. And leave the character-building for the nontearful moments.

“To raise empathetic kids, we have to be empathetic people, and that starts at home,” Hurley said. “Those little conversations that might seem like an afterthought to adults really matter. That's how we raise adults who will go out and help someone.”