Emotion Coaching for Parents
Written by Hannah O’Reilly, RP.
Parents/guardians can sometimes feel overwhelmed and uncertain when it comes to how to best support their pre-teen and adolescent children with large emotions or stressful situations. While wanting to provide alternative solutions and guide their children in the right direction, they can be met with words of criticism or the refrain of “you just don’t understand” from their loved one. In these moments, some parents/guardians begin to feel helpless and disconnected from their child – they are unsure as to how to handle the situation differently and are doing the best they can with the skills they currently have in these hard situations. That is when the skill of emotion coaching can come into play.
Emotion coaching is a skill that parents/guardians (or any supportive adults in the lives of children/teens) can use to validate the emotional experience and difficulties faced by youth. While emotion coaching has a few foundational steps as part of the process, at its core it centers around the importance of providing validation and empathy before solutions and advice. Validation entails trying to understand the lived experience of another and in doing so lets the other person know that they are seen/heard and what they’re experiencing makes sense. It is the absence of judgement, criticism, or minimizing the feelings of another. Adults can validate feelings, thoughts, urges, and behaviours of youth. However, validation doesn’t mean that one needs to necessarily agree with the perspective of the other – they just need to be open to seeing it through their point of view.
Research has shown that validation can be particularly helpful when the word “because” is used multiple times to display an understanding as to why it makes sense for the child or adolescent to be thinking or feeling the way that they do in that moment. This addition helps children and adolescents calm down and truly feel heard in that moment – it helps them not feel isolated in an already difficult time and builds feelings of trust and security.
The following sentence completion is a helpful way to begin to incorporate validation into one’s day-to-day interactions: “I can understand/imagine that you might think/feel/want (insert the feeling/action/thought of the child) because (insert reasoning #1 to show your understanding), because (insert reasoning #2 to show your understanding), and because insert reasoning #3 to show your understanding)”.
Parent therapy sessions can also be a useful tool to provide some additional guidance on how to use validation and the other components of emotion coaching.