How to Validate Without Excusing Negative Behaviors and Creating a Victim Mentality

Dear Yisroel Wahl,

My nine-year-old daughter Chany* often comes home from school complaining about her teacher. These complaints can range from the petty to the more serious. I'm unsure of how to deal with this as I know my child can often be at fault. Besides, I work hard on not disparaging my child's teachers and am afraid that validating my daughter’s complaints will do just that. At the same time, I know that validating my child is important. I would love to get some insight into how I can validate my child without condoning her behavior or disparaging authority. Any help you can give me would be very much appreciated.

Confused Mom

Dear Confused Mom,

Thank you so much for this question! This is another question that so many parents struggle with and is therefore so important to address. And it's not just parents who struggle with this. Anyone involved in any sort of conflict resolution can relate, be it managers, HR, or teachers. How do we validate someone's feelings without condoning their behavior?

In my work, this is especially important. It's easy to validate any and every one of a client's actions. Everyone loves to feel validated. Doing so incorrectly, though, can cause serious harm. A child, teen, or adult that's acting out shouldn't be made to feel that their actions are okay and acceptable.

Years ago, a child who came home from school and complained about a teacher punishing them would get punished again—this time at home. The rationale was that the teacher was assumed to have acted correctly and the child, therefore, deserved punishment from their parents for acting out. This approach had several problems, though. For one, it further escalated the confrontation while angering the child. It would also lead to situations where the child was blamed for actions that he/she was not truly responsible for. Maybe most importantly, this approach drove a wedge between parent and child.

Instead of finding an answer to this problem, we seem to have simply moved to the opposite extreme. Today we are taught to validate, validate, validate. This sounds great in theory, as it helps build relationships with our children, but it can be just as harmful as the first extreme. By validating incorrectly, we can mistakenly condone negative behaviors as well as create a victim mentality.

Devorah* is an adult now, but recently told me a story that she remembers clearly. She was a young teenager when she came home crying about a teacher disciplining her for something she definitely did not do. "My mother and father each had very different reactions. My father made light of my complaints and admonished me, saying that I must have done something wrong or the teacher would not have called me out. This really hurt me, as in this particular situation, I was not in the wrong. My mother had the opposite reaction and went on a monologue about how wrong the teacher was. This made me feel better, but throughout the rest of the year, I never shook that negative view of this teacher."

These are the two extremes that we want to stay away from.

Back to your daughter: What can we do to validate her while neither disparaging authority nor condoning her negative behavior? How can we give all our children the validation they need without condoning their misbehavior or disparaging authority?

The key to proper validation is made up of two parts. The first part is to validate feelings and not behavior. The second part is not to get stuck on validating, and instead, after validating our children, move on to empowering them.

So when Chany comes home complaining about the latest fiasco in school, the first step is to validate her feelings, and do so authentically. Depending on the situation, we can say things like "It must feel so terrible to feel that way" or "I'm so sorry you feel that way." At times it can be best not to say a word and instead simply give her a hug. The main idea here is to validate pain and feelings and not behavior. We can feel the pain of the struggle without condoning wrongful behavior.

The second part of proper validation is not to get stuck in a victim mentality.

I recently got a call from a mother asking me to work with her child. She was hesitant, though, and brought up a concern I hear often. She said that she had a past negative experience with a therapist working with another one of her children. In her words, "The therapist would validate anything and everything my child did to the point that I became a monster in my child's eyes. Anything I did now was terrible, and I could do no right. Not only did my relationship with my child become significantly worse, my child felt no need to change his behavior. Everything he did was right in his eyes because he was a victim of circumstance."

And that is the second harmful aspect of incorrect validation.

When we only focus on validating and don't move on to empowerment, we are in danger of giving our children a mentality of being a victim of life circumstances instead of helping them achieve all that they can.

The way to address this is to move on from validating to empowerment. This is something which I hope to b’ezras Hashem address in future articles. The main idea for now is to start with a growth mindset. "Yes, Chany, you are in pain, but you want to get out of it and you can and will." "Yes, Chany, things have gone wrong, but you have the power to change your circumstances."

The time to do this isn't when the child is hurt. The first thing we want to do is validate that hurt, but after things calm down, we can and must move from validation to addressing the situation. We do this by holding the child accountable for their actions and empowering them to take the steps necessary to fix what is within their control.

*Names and details have been significantly changed to protect strict client confidentiality.

This article was originally published for my column in The Lakewood Shopper - Family Room.