A Clinical Psychologist Is Begging Parents and Grandparents To Stop Making This Punishment Mistake

Yahoo

07-05-2025

If you have kids in your family, you've likely had (and continue to have) plenty of conversations around super fun topics like time-outs, house rules and apologizing. No matter what your parenting style (there's quite a mix between commando, gentle, FAFO, authoritative, free-range and more), parents and grandparents have a lot to keep in mind when outbursts and tantrums inevitably happen.
Even when adults try to be proactive and regulate their own emotions before approaching an upset or dysregulated child, some unintentional blunders are easy to make. There's one punishment mistake, in particular, that is a lot more common than you might think. (You might not even realize you're doing it.)
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Stanford professor and Duke-trained psychologist Dr. Caroline Fleck, author of Validation: How the Skill Set That Revolutionized Psychology Will Transform Your Relationships, Increase Your Influence, and Change Your Life, tells Parade what mistake to avoid, how it impacts kids and what to do instead.
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The Punishment Mistake To Avoid With Your Kids, According to a Clinical Psychologist
The #1 thing to avoid? Emotional invalidation.
"The research on emotional invalidation is alarming—children exposed to pervasive invalidation, wherein their emotions are consistently and routinely dismissed, trivialized or punished, are significantly more likely to develop symptoms of depression, anxiety, PTSD, narcissism and even psychopathy," Dr. Fleck says. "Invalidation is believed to play a causal role in conditions like borderline personality disorder and is highly correlated with self-harm and suicidal behavior. The takeaway from this research is clear—parents who invalidate their children have children who invalidate themselves."
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"And while these studies speak to the effects of pervasive validation, others show that invalidation that occurs strictly in the context of conflict—which is when we're most prone to invalidating kids' emotions—is also problematic," she continues. "Parental invalidation during conflict is highly correlated with anger, emotion dysregulation, oppositional defiance and externalizing problems in kids. Pretty much all of the issues you fear will result from parent-child conflict are significantly more likely to occur if a kid's emotions are invalidated in the process."
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Why It's So Easy To Make This Mistake While Navigating Discipline
"We are hard-wired to protect our children, so when we see them behaving in ways that could compromise their safety, goals or relationships, we want to intervene," Dr. Fleck tells Parade. "To make matters worse, we also have an innate negativity bias that draws our attention to what's 'wrong,' 'bad' or 'problematic' in our environments regardless of whether we're parents. Problematic behavior is the shiny thing that captures our attention. So, while a kiddo's distress over having to get a cavity filled is understandable, it's not nearly as 'shiny' as the tantrum they throw when you're trying to get out the door or the many arguments you had about the importance of brushing."
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How To Emotionally Validate Your Children Instead
"I need to be careful here because I don't want parents to get the impression that they can't problem-solve, have rules or enforce limits with their kids," Dr. Fleck explains.
However, here are two "mantas" she relies on to be effective in these moments:
1. Validate the valid
"You can break down a person's reaction into thoughts, emotions and behavior—this is one of my greatest takeaways from graduate school," Dr. Fleck tells Parade. "Thoughts are valid if they're logical, behaviors are valid if they're effective long-term, and emotions are always valid (see below). When a kid is acting out, it's obvious that their behavior is not valid. They are saying or doing things that are destructive to themselves, their relationships or possibly both. It's important to challenge invalid behavior; you just don't want to suggest that the child's feelings are wrong or bad. I'm a big fan of 'It makes sense that you're frustrated, but it's not ok to throw things.' Helping children identify, label and validate their emotions is critical to learning how to manage them more effectively."
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2. Emotions are always valid
"Full disclosure: Emotions aren't always valid," Dr. Fleck says. "There are plenty of times when a person's emotion or intensity don't fit the facts of the situation. But guess what? It doesn't matter. Because you do not want to get into the business of telling people they don't feel what they're telling you they feel. You might help a kiddo label or describe their emotions, but for your sake and theirs, don't invalidate them."
That doesn't mean you just accept their emotions and leave them to it—you can still offer help and support in various ways.
"Although I don't want you to invalidate your kids' emotions, there's nothing to say you can't draw attention away from them," she adds. "If a child is in meltdown mode, validating their emotions can amplify them. In these cases, it's usually more effective to help distract or draw their attention away from the mirror they're looking at as they increasingly lose control. Once the dust has settled, then you can go back and validate their emotions. Again, you don't have to validate the intensity of the emotion if it was excessive, but helping children recognize the validity of their feelings is the only way to empower them with the ability to self-validate as adults."
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