Not all feelings are valid: Why parents need to teach resilience over emotional indulgence
While most parents simply want to protect their kids, stepping in too fast can prevent them from developing problem-solving skills — which is why licensed therapist RaQuel Hopkins rejects the feel-good “protect your peace” culture of today.
One of the most popular phrases to come out of this has been “all feelings are valid.”
“I have heard that phrase so much … and I just think about the word. I always like to think about defining my terms. And valid means there’s truth to it. Like, if something is valid, that is representative of a reality, but that’s not really true when it comes to our feelings, ” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey tells Hopkins.
“I even talked to someone who’s head of SEL at a school, and she was saying that she teaches these kindergartners that all feelings are valid. And I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t know that I want, you know, my 5-year-old to hear that her jealousy of her sister, her anger that she has to share, is valid,” she continues.
“I would agree,” Hopkins says. “I mean, I don’t teach my children that either. I teach them to be able to express themselves. Learning to figure out what you have internalized to figure out how you want to actually move forward.”
Hopkins believes that children are actually much easier to teach to think and react this way, because opportunities to teach them are “always presenting themselves.”
“Whether it’s your kid comes home and says that someone picked on me, the first thing is not to say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve that,’” she tells Stuckey, pointing out that when her son first came home complaining that he was being picked on, she had an entirely different approach.
“I didn’t get wrapped up on, ‘I acknowledge that it hurts when people are not saying what you consider to be nice things.’ But it was also, ‘Son, you have to learn to live with what God has blessed you with,’” she continues.
And this is what Hopkins believes is missing from most mental health conversations today.
“The spirituality part is missing,” Hopkins says.
“If I am made in His image, or fearfully and wonderfully made,” she tells Stuckey, “there are some things that you’re going to have to learn to accept about your own lived realities, and that’s not always coupled with compassion.”
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