Validate

Starting in early childhood, validation helps us grow emotional intelligence and wellbeing. Validation by mothers has been shown to effect children’s emotional self-awareness, which is a foundational ability for social-emotional intelligence. Mothers who validate their children have more self-aware children, whereas in validation leads to less emotionally self-aware children. (B)

Into adulthood, validation continues to be essential. Studies have shown that, emotionally validating responses from friends and family during hard times help people to manage and mitigate their emotional distress, whereas invalidating responses are rejected and can cause anger. It has also been shown that in people prone to aggression, invalidation tends to elicit aggressive behavior, whereas validation does not. (A)

Despite how great validation feels to receive, many of us are pretty bad at doing it, and can invalidate hundreds of times a day. We tend to jump ahead to the implication of our conversation partner’s feelings for us, and try to control them. With our spaces we might say, “Don’t make such a big deal that your steak is not cooked right,” because we don’t want to fuss of bothering the waitress. Or to our kids we say, “You’re fine. Of course you’re going to school!”