Many positive parenting and gentle parenting frameworks recommend that you validate your child’s feelings. But what does that mean exactly? This quick guide will walk you through how to validate your child’s feelings, and why it’s worth the effort.
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What does it Mean to Validate Your Child’s Feelings?
When you hear the phrase “validating feelings”, what comes to mind?
Do you picture warm and fuzzy fluff? Or responses thick with therapy babble?
Maybe you envision yourself uttering a magical combination of words that will stop the meltdown in its tracks and help your kid calm down fast.
For some parents and caregivers, the thought of validating feelings conjures up words like “permissive”, “coddling”, or “spoiled”. They worry that by making space for their child’s emotions they are somehow ignoring or excusing the unwanted behaviors.
But feelings validation doesn’t encourage bad behavior. And it isn’t intended to get rid of the feelings either. When done right, validating your child’s feelings actually sets you up to better address unwanted behavior.
Validating Your Child’s Feelings Helps With Behavior
You can still set limits and hold firm boundaries for your kids while validating their emotional experience. When you validate your kids’ feelings, you are simply saying that their feelings are acceptable, there is space for them, and they are allowed to feel how they feel.
That doesn’t mean your child is allowed to throw their toys or hit their brother when he won’t play with them, but they are free to feel hurt and angry about the situation.
By sending the message that their feelings make sense to you, your child will naturally start to return to a calmer state. This not only decreases the likelihood of unwanted behavior, but your child will be better able to hear what you have to teach them. Once their thinking brain comes back online, they will be ready to collaborate with you to solve whatever issue brought about their big feelings in the first place.
Examples of How to Validate Feelings
There are lots of ways to validate your child’s feelings and help them feel seen and heard. Here are a few examples that you can easily work into your parenting routine.
Help Your Child Name the Feeling
One simple way way to validate feelings is to work with your child to identify what they are feeling. If you notice your child starting to have an emotional response to something, you could say something like, “You seem like you might be feeling ____. Do you want to talk about that?” Giving your child space to identify and share what is going on for them can be helpful.
Give Space for Silence
There are times when kids are too overwhelmed by big emotions to use words to describe it.
Allowing space for that is important. When they can’t (or won’t) find the words, respect their needs. Instead of asking them to tell you what’s happening, make an observation about what you see. Stick to the facts and don’t make assumptions. Saying something like, “I wonder if you don’t want to talk about it right now.” can help them feel validated.
Another example might be, “I noticed that you’re crying and it seems like you’re feeling a little sad.” This can be a good way to validate without telling your child how they feel.
Accept Their Feelings
Once you are able to help them share or name what they are feeling, the next step is to honor it with a statement of acceptance. Something like, “You feel angry that you can’t go to the park. It can be frustrating when we can’t do something we want to do.”
That kind of acceptance of their emotional experience can help a child feel understood. In my experience, when children feel like their caregivers get what’s going on for them, they rarely escalate to an out of control place. They feel like you are in their corner, even while you are still holding the boundary or behavioral expectation.
Boost Their Emotional IQ During Downtime
When things are calm, you can teach them the language of emotion. When your child has the skills to communicate how they feel, it boosts their chances of getting that much needed validation.
There are lots of excellent books, tools, and toys focused on emotion regulation. Here are some of my favorites:
- My Mood My Choices Flipbook
- Calming Corner Posters on Emotion Regulation
- Lovevery Play Kits for Learning and Development
- In My Heart: A Book of Feelings
- A Little SPOT of Emotion 8 Book Box Set
Benefits of Emotional Validation
Emotional validation is not only important because it helps kids feel seen and heard, but it also helps them learn to trust their internal experience.
Emotions aren’t good or bad, they just are. They show up to give us important messages about our environment, ourselves, and those around us. When we teach children to embrace their emotions and learn from them, we send the message that their emotional experiences are valid, important, and useful.
This fosters self-awareness skills and raises their emotional intelligence. They are in better position to self-regulate and behave in ways that support their needs.
Modeling emotional awareness through validation of feelings and co-regulation not only positively impacts your child’s mental health and wellness, but improves their interpersonal relationships, too.
The Consequences of Emotional Invalidation
When children learn that their emotions are not welcome, they begin to feel that they are not welcome either.
Lack of Connection
They feel less connected to the caregivers who are supposed to love them unconditionally. This may inadvertently make them feel as if they don’t belong. They might even maximize their emotional experience in an attempt to feel heard, often resulting in acting out behaviors that parents don’t want.
Acting Out Behaviors
Not only that, but kids who are told to shut down their emotional experiences or get punished for expressing their emotions, don’t get the chance to learn how to navigate their big feelings. They might develop negative ways of managing their emotions, like physical or verbal aggression for example.
What’s more, children might learn to disconnect from their emotional experience entirely. They might suppress tears to avoid getting yelled at, or tone down their excitement so as not to annoy their parents. Or they might dissociate and stop paying attention in order to protect themselves from invalidating responses.
The problem with these protective coping patterns is that the emotional energy needs to go somewhere, and it often gets acted out through less desirable behaviors, some of which are outside of the child’s control.
Getting Support On How to Validate Feelings
Learning how to validate the feelings of those you love doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Maybe you grew up in a home where you regularly experienced emotional invalidation. Or maybe you are having trouble separating the feelings from the behavior.
Whatever the case may be, validating your child’s feelings isn’t always easy. Enlisting the support of a mental health professional is an excellent way to build emotional validation into your parenting routine. Finding a therapist who specializes in parenting is a good place to start.
Parenting Support at the Center for Creative Counseling
The Center for Creative Counseling offers therapy and parenting support for residents of Pennsylvania. Whether you live in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Erie, or Lancaster, you can receive online therapy to help tackle your parenting challenges.
If you live in Pennsylvania, and you are interested in starting therapy with me, I offer a free 15-minute consultation to make sure I am a good fit for what you are looking for. Please feel free to browse my website, explore the therapy services I offer, and check out the rates for therapy.
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