Updated October 2026. I corrected how I described the Gottman study and the evidence on naming feelings, and fixed typos.
You hear it everywhere: “validate your kid’s feelings,” “tell them what you observe,” “…it expands their emotional vocabulary…,” “name it to tame it.”
I can remember vividly the first time I tried this on my son. We were outside coloring, all was going well, then I spotted distress after I told him we needed to start cleaning up and preparing to go take a nap. Ok, no biggie, let me tell him what I observe, let me validate his feelings…
The next thing I know, we were here:
He stopped crying immediately, looked at me, and screamed “I’m not mad!” He got up, moved closer to me and burst into a full tantrum again.
I wish I would’ve taken a picture of me in that moment questions what I had done wrong and wondering what the hell I was supposed to do next.
I told him what I observed like the parenting advice told me to do. He told me that he wasn’t even though I knew he was. He probably knew that he was too. But he wasn’t having it. The parenting advice didn’t cover that part.
*Here is my funny sidenote: at 8, this is still his crying face - same furrowed brow. My sweet boy.
Once he calmed down, we talked about whatever the hell that was. I validated that he was upset although I dare not say mad again. I told him it’s ok to feel that way, and that I get that way sometimes too. But where was this going? I named it. It didn’t tame it - not even a little bit.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand doing this work: parenting advice, mine included, almost always hands you a snippet of the full picture. It’s not because anyone is holding out, but because a 60 second reel doesn’t have room for the full picture. Hence the reason I love being on Substack to have a platform that a reel is never able to give parents.
So here is the full picture on validating emotions: the steps, the why, and what to expect during and after (and years to come).
Step one: notice it before it’s a full meltdown
This is catching the shoulders creeping up, the jaw setting, the whine starting before it becomes a scream. Basically my first picture where I first noticed that unhappy face. It’s not “here we go again,” but clocking that something is building. These days, I am hyper focused on the art of noticing. Noticing not only my kids, but me and when these feelings are building before I can’t stop the train from going off the tracks.
Step two: connect instead of correcting
Instead of “we don’t have time for this right now", either said verbally or through body language, even when we definitely do not have time for this right now, it’s getting down to their level and asking “hey, what’s going on?” Treating this moment as an opening not to be afraid of or dread as an interruption to the day or plans.
Step three: validate it
“It is really disappointing we have to stop coloring to take a nap” instead of “it’s not a big deal” or “you’re fine.” Let the feeling be real before you do anything else with it. It shows our kids we can manage their feelings, we are a support system, and that they can come to us with those emotions. When they learn the latter, they know they can come to us with their feelings. In my experience, kids who learn that big feelings are welcome at home are more likely to keep bringing them to us. It doesn’t guarantee a teen will, but it’s the foundation I’d want.
Step four: name it, and know what it’s actually doing
“I see you’re mad…”
This is the one everyone’s heard a million times. What most people haven’t heard is why it might work (even if your kid gives push back, like mine did). Naming a feeling builds your child’s emotional vocabulary, and in one 2026 study of 334 Chinese preschoolers, kids with stronger emotion recognition and vocabulary were rated by their parents and teachers as better at handling their emotions (Zhu et al., 2026). That is a link, not proof that naming causes it. Naming a feeling may also help take the edge off it. In a brain imaging study at UCLA, when 30 adults put a feeling into words, a part of the prefrontal cortex (the brain’s braking system) got more active and the amygdala (the alarm) quieted down (Lieberman et al., 2007). That was adults looking at faces, not kids and not a parent doing the naming, and later research has been mixed. So I see it as a reason naming might help, not a promise it will calm your child in the moment.
Which means when my son pushed back, that wasn’t the technique failing. He didn’t correct the label at one year old like he would now, “I’m frustrated, not mad,” which in my read would have been a good sign that he was already sorting out some of that emotional work himself. At one, he just refused to be named at all. My best guess is a mix of his temperament and a nervous system that wasn’t ready to be calmed yet. He was resisting the thing that was supposed to calm. In that moment, it read as total failure, as it does to other parents who experience this push back. But it isn’t. It just wasn’t the instant calming I/we hope for.
Step five: hold the boundary while you solve it together
This is the one almost nobody talks about when we discuss emotional validation. And probably because it’s hard to do when your kid is losing it. It’s definitely not “calm down, you’re going to take your nap.”
We can’t let the meltdown decide whether things happen. In our house it sounds like, “I know you’re disappointed that you have to stop coloring, but we are going to get ready for a nap. Do you want to put the colors away and we can do this another day when we have more time, or do you want to save this activity for when you wake up and we can finish up then?” The feeling stays completely real, it just doesn’t get the final vote on the nap happening.
Psychologist John Gottman and his colleagues followed 56 two-parent families from when their kids were about 4 to 5 until about 8 (Gottman et al., 1996). They interviewed each parent about how they handled their own sadness and anger and their child’s. Parents whose interviews showed an emotion-coaching approach (noticing feelings, treating them as a chance to connect and teach, validating, helping name them, and setting limits while problem solving) tended to have kids who were sick less often at 8, which was the clearest finding. The study also found links, some of them indirect, to how teachers rated the kids’ friendships and to school test scores. It was a small, preliminary, correlational study, and the authors could not tell whether coaching shaped kids’ calming systems or whether calmer kids were simply easier to coach.
What I take from it is my own read, not something the study measured: nothing here promises an instant calm down, and in my experience it takes years of reps. Parenting is a long game, but we are building strong foundations. Anything that promises you instant results is lying to you.
The part I’ve noticed
You can’t access these steps under pressure if your own nervous system hasn’t practiced staying regulated somewhere else first. Kids seem to pick up on our stress quickly. In one small lab study, babies’ heart rates rose after their mothers were stressed (Waters et al., 2014). Polyvagal theory calls this neuroception. It’s a contested model, not settled science, but it gets at why “just stay calm” is easy to say and nearly impossible to do on command. If you’re depleted, all of these steps aren’t a knowledge problem, it’s a bandwidth problem.
That’s exactly what I built The Presence Protocol to solve as a conditioning practice for your own nervous system. Paid subscribers get it for free along with my other three toolkits here:
What To Do Next
If you landed here because validating your child's feelings hasn't been working the way you expected, you now have the full map: five steps, not one, with what each looks like and why naming sometimes stalls out.
If your next thought is "okay, but how do I actually hold a boundary calmly after a full workday when I'm running on fumes," that's a bandwidth problem, not a knowledge problem, and it's exactly what The Presence Protocol was built to solve: a short, research-backed practice that conditions your nervous system in calm moments so it's actually available in the hard ones.
And if what you’re working through is a specific, older, or more entrenched pattern with your particular child, the version of this isn’t solved by a script. That is what a discovery call is for - two of us figuring out what’s actually going on for your child, so you can handle these situations with confidence under your own bandwidth and family dynamics.
By Lauren Greeno
Child & Adolescent Development Specialist & Parenting Coach | Founder, The Parenting Collaborative
Lauren specializes in helping parents understand invisible dynamics shaping their children’s development and redesigning family systems before patterns calcify into adult identity. With expertise in child development, family systems theory, and trauma-informed parenting, she works with families navigating sibling dynamics, only child considerations, neurodivergence, emotional regulation, and breaking generational patterns.
Work with Lauren: Book a discovery call | Learn more| Instagram | TikTok
References
Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: Theoretical models and preliminary data. Journal of Family Psychology, 10(3), 243-268.
Gottman, J. M., & DeClaire, J. (1997). Raising an emotionally intelligent child: The heart of parenting. Simon & Schuster.
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Waters, S. F., West, T. V., & Mendes, W. B. (2014). Stress contagion: Physiological covariation between mothers and infants. Psychological Science, 25(4), 934-942. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613518352
Zhu, C., Ip, K. I., Liu, Z., & Yan, N. (2026). Labeling it makes you feel better: The role of affect labeling on emotion regulation among Chinese preschoolers. Child Development, 97(2), 451-464.
