Are We Going Too Far? When Validation Stops Helping and Starts Holding Teens Back

Emotionally supporting children and teens lets them know that their feelings matter and deserve to be heard. As parents, providing this level of scaffolding for your child allows them to build trust in the relationship and gives them a solid blueprint for relationships in general. This blueprint acts as a framework for emotional safety, mutual respect, and collaborative problem-solving, meaning teens can move forward in life with stability and confidence. 

But there’s an invisible limit on how much validation parents should provide their teen. Over-validating teens can backfire, potentially leading to increased negative behaviors and emotional dysregulation, as well as preventing the development of resilience and self-regulation.^[1] 

If you’re finding it hard to strike a balance between providing emotional validation for teenagers and excessively reassuring them, this blog can help. It covers what validation is and why it matters, when it crosses the line into unhealthy validation, and ways to promote teen resilience. 

What Is Validation?

Validation is the actions we take to make sure someone feels heard and understood. For example, if someone we care about is feeling upset, we might: 

• Actively listen to the problem.
• Verbally reflect what they said.
• Accept what they’re communicating without judgment.
• Respond empathetically. 

In a nutshell, validation is showing this person that you appreciate and understand their point of view, even if you disagree with them. 

Validation also comes in two main forms:

1. Emotional validation: This is when we validate someone else’s concerns or beliefs. It tends to happen most often in close relationships, such as those with family members, romantic partners, and friends. 
2. Self-validation: This is when we affirm or validate our own experiences rather than relying on others to reassure us. It can come in the form of acknowledging our own emotions, knowing that it’s okay to feel a certain way, and affirmations. 

Why Validation Matters in Parenting

As a parent or caregiver, your relationship with your child becomes their first template for understanding how the world works and how they fit in it. So when you communicated to them that their internal experiences mattered and made sense, they:

• Felt seen and understood.
• Knew they were allowed to feel a certain way.
• Could make sense of their feelings.
• Felt supported during challenging moments.

As a result of this validation, a child feels safe in the relationship, understands that other people can be trusted in general, and knows that they’re worthwhile. 

In contrast, invalidating behaviors, such as rejecting, judging, or minimizing what a child is saying, can make them feel dismissed. They may internalize such behaviors as meaning that what they feel, say, and do doesn’t matter. And studies show that parental invalidation can lead to:^[2] 

• Emotional dysregulation.
• Behavioral problems.
• Lower levels of satisfaction in the parent-child relationship.

Additionally, the type of emotion validated by a parent might make a difference. For instance, one study showed that validating shame and sadness could lead to more positive emotions than validating fear.^[3] 

But validation shouldn’t stop in early childhood – it counts just as much in the teenage years. Adolescence is an important second window of development, in which teens seek increased autonomy while still relying on the safety of their parents’ support. 

Validation at this stage helps teens develop a more robust sense of identity and emotional resilience, as well as allows them to learn how to self-validate. Further, parental validation might be protective against self-harm in adolescence. In contrast, invalidation could increase the risk.^[4][5] 

However, validation isn’t the same as condoning. Understanding why someone feels a certain way doesn’t mean you should allow them to act destructively or negatively based on these feelings.  

Difference Between Healthy and Unhealthy Emotional Validation

Parenting and emotional validation serve to provide empathy, respect, and genuine care for a child or teen’s experiences. It is the cornerstone of mutual satisfaction in the relationship and supports a child’s current and future well-being. 

However, over-validating teens could:^[6] 

• Enable destructive behaviors.
• Foster co-dependency.
• Drive negative ways of thinking.
• Increase parental distress. 

But parents may feel conflicted about whether they’re healthily validating teen emotions or crossing the line into permissiveness. The following signs of over-validating teens may help you make this distinction.

Condoning Negative Actions

When validation becomes enabling, we might see parents excusing or condoning a teen’s negative or harmful behaviors. This could perpetuate the pattern and prevent healthy self-reflection and growth.

Emotional Avoidance in Teens

In an attempt to validate a teen’s experience, some parents may attempt to avoid conflict at all costs. However, all healthy relationships involve some form of conflict, so never confronting a situation could lead to emotional avoidance in teens and the prevention of personal growth. 

Manipulation or Control

If a teen recognizes overpermissiveness as a route to getting their way, they might use it as a tactic to gain control over situations. Manipulation is a common behavior in teens as they try to increase their autonomy or avoid negative consequences, but over-validating teens could lead to an imbalanced relationship.

Codependent Relationships 

Instead of fostering independence, over-validating teens could lead to blurred boundaries in the relationship, where both the teen and parent over-rely on each other for emotional support. This could prevent a teen from forging a robust sense of personal identity and learning how to self-validate. 

If you suspect that your attempts at validating your teen are crossing into unhealthy territory, it’s not too late to focus on developing more independent teen coping skills. In the next section, we cover ways of doing so. 

Teen Mental Health Parenting Strategies for Promoting Teen Emotional Resilience

Being sensitive to and validating a teen’s needs is essential for their well-being and for your relationship with them. But does this mean you have to accept, overlook, or allow every negative behavior they show? Of course not. 

Platforms such as social media might lead you to believe you must always validate a teen’s feelings and actions. But it is also possible to go too far. Below, we go into some strategies for striking a balance between healthy and unhealthy emotional validation for teenagers. 

Validate Their Feelings, Not Their Reactions

If your teen has a consistent habit of reacting impulsively to their feelings, a line needs to be drawn between what is acceptable and what is not. You can still validate their emotions during these times, but it’s also okay to help them distinguish between healthy and unhealthy behaviors. 

For example, you could say, “I understand why you’re feeling this way. What happened was very frustrating. However, it’s not alright for you to lash out like that.”

Help Them Adapt

Instead of getting caught in an ongoing cycle of validation without action, once you’ve validated their feelings, help them adapt to the situation. Unconditional validation without resolution could cause you both to dysregulate instead of regulate your feelings. 

So, support them in coming to a resolution. This might look like saying, “I know you’re angry about what happened, but let’s figure out a solution to this problem together.”

Respect Their Boundaries

The likely truth is that your teen wants and needs their personal space. So while you might want to consistently get to the root of their problem and provide support, they may not always want you to. This requires judging when your support is genuinely needed, and when you might need to take a back seat. 

Create Your Own Boundaries

While it’s important to respect your teen’s boundaries, your own matter just as much. Think about what over-validating might be costing you in terms of: 

• Time.
• Emotional and physical resources.
• Your relationships. 

It’s okay to set limits on how much validation you provide. As long as you’re there for your child during genuine times of need, that’s all that matters. 

Promote Autonomy

For identity development, a teenager needs to explore their ability to make informed choices for themselves. You don’t have to leave them to their own devices in the process; you can still validate their concerns if they have any. But try to encourage them to make healthy choices and problem-solve.  

Seek Professional Advice

If your personal boundaries are becoming blurred with those of your child, there could be a chance that you’re entering into enmeshment territory.^[7] Also, if your child is consistently relying on manipulation or coercion to an unhealthy degree to get their needs met, then this could signal that something deeper is going on. 

In either case, professional support could help you and your child get to the root of the issue and develop healthier methods of validation moving forward. 

Dialectical behavior therapy helps a teen make sense of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the context of their current situation. A DBT therapist doesn’t condone actions, but instead helps them strike a healthy balance between needing reassurance and independence. 

Get Professional Support for Raising Resilient Teenagers