Not only were all our conversations turning into arguments, I was also telling my children over and over again not to trust their own perceptions but to rely on mine instead.
Simple Picture
ELI5: a child comes to you crying. Your instinct is to fix it, minimize it, or explain it away. “It’s not that bad.” “Don’t cry.” “Here’s what you should do.” Every one of these responses tells the child: your feelings are wrong. The child hears: I am wrong for feeling this. Do this enough times and the child stops bringing you their feelings — and eventually stops feeling them.
The alternative: “That sounds really frustrating.” That is all. The child’s nervous system registers: my experience is real, someone sees it, I am not alone in it. From this single shift, everything follows.
The Core Principle
Children don’t need to have their feelings agreed with; they need to have them acknowledged. What people of all ages can use in a moment of distress is not agreement or disagreement — they need someone to recognize what they are experiencing.
The more you try to push a child’s unhappy feelings away, the more he becomes stuck in them. The more comfortably you can accept the bad feelings, the easier it is for kids to let go of them.
This is Rogers’ three conditions made operational for parents. Congruence: being real about what you see. Unconditional positive regard: accepting the child’s feelings without requiring them to be different. Empathic understanding: recognizing what the child is experiencing from inside their frame. When these conditions are present, the child’s capacity for self-regulation develops naturally.
When they are absent — when the parent questions, blames, advises, or minimizes — the child learns that their perceptions are untrustworthy. This is the origin of running-on-empty: the emotional neglect that produces adults who cannot name or trust their own feelings, who run on empty because the fuel of feeling was never validated.
Entitled to Be Miserable
I want my kids to know that they’re entitled to be miserable without their mother falling apart.
The parent who suffers over their child’s suffering creates a double bind: the child is upset about the original problem, then more upset because the parent is upset about their upset. The child feels guilty for not being happy — as if there was something wrong with them for having feelings. The fourth commandment (“look at all we sacrificed — how can you be unhappy?”) is this pattern codified as cultural norm.
If you want to have a happy family, you had better be prepared to permit the expression of a lot of unhappiness. This is pleasure as organizing principle applied to parenting: the family that organizes around the avoidance of unpleasant feelings produces children who cannot feel. The family that can hold unhappiness creates children who can move through it.
Stop Fixing
When we give children advice or instant solutions, we deprive them of the experience that comes from wrestling with their own problems. When children are given information, they can usually figure out for themselves what needs to be done.
This is the inner game of parenting: Self 1 (the parent’s advice, correction, instruction) interferes with Self 2 (the child’s natural problem-solving). Johnstone’s teaching method applies: the first thing he does is play low status and tell students that if they fail, they should blame him. Failure is suddenly not frightening. Most students succeed, but they are not trying to win.
The IFS principle: protectors must be consulted before exiles can be met. In parenting terms: the child’s anger, sadness, or fear is a protector carrying a message. If you attack the protector (“stop crying,” “don’t be angry”), you strengthen it. If you acknowledge it (“those are rough feelings to have”), the protector relaxes enough to deliver its message.
Accepting Feelings Enables Limits
When we accepted our children’s feelings, they were more able to accept the limits we set for them. This resolves the false dichotomy between permissiveness and authoritarianism that the need for adults describes: the problem is not too many rules or too few, but rules without emotional acknowledgment. The child who feels seen can tolerate limits. The child who feels unseen experiences every limit as rejection.
boundaries work the same way in adult relationships: the person capable of saying “I hear you, and also no” is exercising a boundary that the other can accept. The person who says “no” without acknowledgment produces defiance. The person who says “yes” without meaning it produces resentment.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “just validate everything — never say no.”
The midwit take is “this is permissive parenting that produces entitled children.”
The better take is that acknowledging feelings and setting limits are not in tension — they are complementary. The child who hears “You really wanted that toy, and we’re not buying it today” gets both: their desire is real AND the limit is real. Neither is sacrificed. The result is a child who learns that feelings are information, not emergencies — and that they can tolerate frustration without either suppressing it or being consumed by it.
Main Payoff
Even though the child knew it was not going to happen, he seemed to appreciate that his longing was taken so seriously. He likes his “wish list” because it shows that his parent not only knows what he wants but cares enough to put it in writing.
This is Maté’s insight in practice: no one can instill motivation in anyone else. But you can create the conditions — safety, acknowledgment, the absence of judgment — in which motivation arises naturally. The parent who acknowledges feelings is not fixing the child. They are providing the conditions in which the child can fix themselves.
References:
- Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk