Validating Child Emotions to Boost Your Child's Self Confidence
Validating child emotions is another important step in developing an emotionally intelligent child. It lets us as parents show that we respect, accept and understand our childs emotions. Validating our child’s emotions is an important step in helping him to understand and trust his feelings. This in turn helps to boost child self confidence by letting him know he is valued.
Why should we Validate our Childs Emotions?
When we understand our feelings we are able to use them more effectively. Just like anything in life once we know what something is, how it works and why its does what it does we are able to use it more effectively to improve our lives. For example, image for a moment coming here from another planet and seeing white funny looking contraptions sitting in the corner of the room.
Now unless you know what these contraptions are and how to use them you will not be able to make much use of them. After all without the understanding of what these funny looking white contraptions are you might end up putting your clothes in the fridge, food in the dishwasher and your dishes in the washing machine.
Feelings are just the same, to use them well we first need to know what they are and how they work. As parents validating our childs emotions is another tool that we can use in our journey as emotion coaches.
Having someone to validate our childs feelings is one of her first steps in becoming an emotionally intelligent child. By accepting her feelings we are teaching her that it is okay to have feelings and that emotions are very much a normal part of life.
How to Validate Child Emotions
Let all of your Child Emotions be okay
Understand your Child Emotions
Step 1 Let all of your Child Emotions be okay
To successfully validate a childs emotions we must accept that all feelings are legitimate, regardless of what type of feelings these are. It is okay that our child sometimes feels anger or jealousy. It is these feelings along with all of our other emotions that need to be validated as normal.
While all child emotions are okay, it is some of the behaviours that we often see associated with these feelings that are not always acceptable, like yelling, snatching toys or pushing.
Step 2 Understand your Child Emotions
Understanding our child’s emotions is not as difficult as it may first seem. One of the first steps in understanding a child’s emotions is to first look at our own emotional responses.
Chances are our child has developed some of our techniques from
behavioural modeling
for dealing with and understanding his emotions. If self reflection is not your strong point then don’t worry it is something that we can all learn.
Start by acknowledging the child emotions that we see everyday and simply acknowledge and comment on them,
You are happy today, or
I can see that made you really sad/angry/frustrated.
I can see that something is upsetting you do you want to talk about it?
Sometimes a hug or special attention can speak volumes.
For example, you see your child is clearly upset, he came home from school and went straight to his room and slammed the door shut. You tried to talk to him but he just put up a wall and said everything was fine.
Maybe just respecting his need for privacy and telling him you are here for him is enough.
Maybe you could do something nice for him to show you are aware that things are not great at the moment. For example, a hug, or maybe you could cook his favorite food for tea, let him off his chores for the night or do something else that shows him you care and understand.
If you are new to this just keep it simple to start with, keep it natural and let it grow as you develop greater understanding of your childs emotions and those of others feelings.
I can hear some of you saying that is easy for you say, I come from an emotionally empty family, feelings were not talked about when I was growing up. Well believe me when I say that you are far from alone.
Most of my friends including myself are in the same boat. My parents not only had trouble talking about or expressing their feelings they were actively encouraged to dismiss their feelings.
Before I was born my parents had the extreme misfortune of losing a child from a tragic accident. They were told by their local doctor to go home and have another child. They received no counseling and very little help in dealing with their grief.
From what I have seen this is pretty much the prevailing thoughts on how to deal with death and tragedy back in the sixties. Luckily today, however, we have a far greater understanding of the role that emotions play in our lives and we are encouraged to be more pro-active with them.
The Mistakes I made in Learning to Validate my Child's Emotions
When I first started working on my parenting skills to help both of my children become emotionally intelligent I tried to validate every one of my childs emotions. I tried to watch every move my children made so I could validate their feelings and put all of this information into practice.
I made all of my child's emotions okay but I got confused between feelings and behaviours and started to make all behaviours okay as well. I was making sure I saw every issue from my kids point of view (the whole empathy thing) and was able to easily see the why behind their behaviours.
Unfortunately this made me a bad parent, I wasn’t giving my children any direction and I certainly was not teaching them that some behaviours are not appropriate.
So I had to go back and re-examine what I though was my role as a parent was and what values I wanted to instill in my kids, (to see my article on parenting guide to explain this further click on the link below).
So after some trial and error in developing my parenting skills to validate my childs emotions and re-reading John Gottmans book, “The Heart of Parenting” I have found the right balance I need to be my children’s emotion coach.
The four main points that have helped me the most in learning to validate my childs emotions are:
I only need to do this about 40% of the time for it to be effective
Being clear on what I wanted to instill in my children
(see my article on parenting guide for more information)
Distinguishing between my own needs and the needs of my kids (the above two points have helped me to know what arguments I must win and which ones I am happy to lose to let my kids feel like they have some control over what they do)
I accept what my kids tell me they feel or think as being totally true for their reality. Even if their reality is different from mine (and it normally is) I accept it as being simply different not wrong or right from my own.
Validating child emotions is one step in developing an emotionally intelligent child to continue reading on the other steps involved click on one of the links below
What is an Emotionally Intelligent Child
Why we Should Build an Emotionally Intelligent Child
Teaching Empathy
Strengthening the Parent Child Bond through Emotions
How to Create an Emotionally Intelligent Child
Child Feelings How to Correctly Label them to Empower Your Child
Encourage Child Emotional Development by Taking the Time to Listen
Goal Setting for Kids
Goal Setting for Kids, Effective Problem Solving
Goal Setting for Kids, How to give Feedback
Teaching Emotional Intelligence, when Not to do it
Keep watching our website for the following to be posted soon.
• Articles on Child Developmental Stages
• Articles on how to Communicate with your child
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