Maybe I shouldn't be validating my kids so much

I became a parent wanting to do things differently than how I was raised, but something isn’t working about my approach.

When I was a young kid in the early 90s, I was crying and stomping my feet. My dad reacted with anger. In front of my mom and older brothers, he spanked my bare bottom and sent me to my room at the far end of our long 70s suburban house until I calmed down.

Sitting alone, I felt resentment towards my parents. I stopped crying, but my anger metastasized into a promise to subvert them.

Now I live in California, I’ve done a lot of meditation and other spiritual work, and I’m trying to cultivate trust with my children.

I validate their emotions. And I take seriously their preferences. And I think I may have gone too far.

One of my kids has been getting increasingly emotional over the last ten months or so. She went to a small preschool when she was three. When I brought her back this year after a break, her teacher said she’d changed.

She said my kid was once joyful every day. Now, she often comes to school sullen. The other kids seem on edge when she’s in these moods.

Then she has big emotional outbursts, and other kids comply with what she wants to help her calm down. But their bodies are tense when they do.

It was hard to hear her teacher's feedback because I’ve been feeling this at home too. I feel on edge, waiting for the next time she yells when something doesn’t go the way she expected. I thought this might be a phase that 5-year-olds go through, but her preschool teacher, who’s been teaching for 35+ years, doesn’t think it is.

I asked my pediatrician for referrals to behavioral coaches and came across one website that felt like it knew exactly what we’d been experiencing. It listed a set of things I wasn’t expecting to be related. For example, over the last year, my daughter has gone from eating most foods, to being increasingly rigid about what she will eat. The list of foods she tolerates seems to shrink week-by-week, and I’ve started to worry if she’s eating enough.

The website was for a therapist who works with parents with young kids with anxiety. So I started to look up how to work with kids with anxiety, and it began to seem like my parenting style may have been cultivating it.

My parents said “Stop, and if you don’t there will be consequences,” or “Just think about something else.” Then I felt both upset, and alone.

What I’ve been saying is more like, “You feel upset? I hear you. I love you. Want to talk about it? That makes sense. Sounds hard.” I might give my kids a hug or a cuddle. Wait until it passes, or help them distract themselves if it doesn’t. I stop everything else.

Unintentionally, I think I may have been giving my kids the impression that their upset was a Big Deal. Or that they are fragile and in need of caretaking. Or that they are victims.

The path I’m now thinking about is this: to validate, but then move to emphasizing agency. To say something like, “You’re upset. I know you can get through this. I’m here with you.”

In the last few weeks, I’ve tried more “anxiety-conscious” approaches, and I think it’s helping. My daughter's upsets have halved.

My kids have also seemed to be responding well to when I normalize their hurt or upset.

Today, my daughter got a scrape and came to me screaming, “Mom, look! I got a huge scrape! It hurts so much!” (It was a very small scrape). And I said “You got a scrape. That’s a normal scrape. I get scrapes like that a lot.” She said “But isn’t it huge?” her voice shaking. And I replied, “very normal.” With an undisturbed affect. “Oh,” she said, and seemed to calm down.

Is this different than just denying my kids’ feelings? I’m hoping it’s different because it starts with validation. And because it emphasizes that we’re all in this together, and that you’re not alone. But I have a lot of questions and it feels foreign.

I connected with the therapist, and she’s available to start meeting in a month, so we’ll do that. In the meantime, I told her what I’ve been trying, and she said it was a good direction but emphasized to keep it short. Even shorter.