Tips to Validate Your Teen’s Feelings

When you validate your teen’s feelings, they may be more likely to come to you when experiencing a hardship or mental health challenge. Your validation may also help them trust and manage their own emotions and experiences. Stephanie Cherestal, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist and subject matter expert for The Jed Foundation (JED), shares strategies to validate your teen’s feelings.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Dr.

Stephanie Cheristal,

And I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and a subject matter expert in psychology for the Jett Foundation.

And today I'm here to talk about tips to validate your teen's feelings.

Your teen is way more likely to come to you about their mental health challenges or other hardships that they're experiencing when they know that you are going to take them seriously and actually validate their feelings.

Validation also helps your teen know that they aren't exaggerating and it can actually help them ultimately learn to validate their own feelings and emotional experiences.

Meet your teen with curiosity.

Don't write off or dismiss how your teen is feeling because you don't fully understand it.

Ask questions to get a better idea of where your teen is coming from.

Do your best to try to put yourself in your teen's shoes and understand the situations that they're facing from their perspective rather than from your own perspective.

Work with your teen to label their feelings.

Research actually shows that labeling your feelings and labeling your emotions can actually make emotions easier to manage,

Even those painful emotions.

So you might say,

Like,

From what you're sharing with me,

It sounds like you're really angry with your friends.

Would you say that that's an accurate way to describe what it is that you're experiencing?

You definitely want to check with your team to see if it's landing the way that you want it to land and making sure that it feels like the actual experience that they're having and being open to correction if you're labeling their emotional experience incorrectly differently.

Use phrases that affirm their experiences.

So saying something like that sounds really challenging or this is really hard.

I'm so sorry that you're dealing with this can help your teen feel seen and heard.

And parents,

It's important to utilize whatever language comes naturally to you,

Whether that's that really stinks or I'm so sorry that this is something that you have to deal with.

Take action to show that you are listening.

Say your teen shares with you that they've been having a difficult time falling asleep at night.

You can show with your actions that you were listening and that you heard them.

You might work with them around developing a nighttime routine to help them fall asleep more easily at night.

Or you can actually lead by example by putting your phone away at a certain time every night and encouraging them to do the same.

You Bye.