Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Well, today I'm going to be talking about this idea of

validating, or I actually prefer the term acknowledging a child's feelings. Some of the benefits of that,

and mostly also I want to focus on the common challenges,

because I hear from many parents that this isn't working for them.

And so I would like to try to speak to that and talk about some of the common reasons

that this practice isn't as successful as we might want it to be.

Okay, so first I just want to mention why I prefer the term acknowledge to validate.

Validating feelings, that's, of course, something that's helpful to do with children,

but we're not going to really

be able to get to that point a lot of the time.

So it's kind of asking a lot of us, I think, to validate feelings that maybe seem totally

unreasonable and not very valid to us in the moment.

Like when our child is saying, I don't want you to put those

peas right next to my mashed potatoes or something like that. It will often not make sense to us

when children have the reactions that they do, especially when they have behaviors that go

along with those reactions, like lashing out, hitting or hurting

or other things that are really hard for us as a parent to be able to validate.

So dialing it all the way back, as my mentor Magda Gerber did, to this word acknowledge,

can make this more doable for us.

I'm just acknowledging that you feel a certain way about something or that you're upset about a certain thing, but I'm not necessarily jumping all the way to how valid you are for feeling that

way.

And from there, I want to talk a little about why I even

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