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Emotional Validation
Giving Children all they need for their optimal emotional intelligence and health
By Genevieve Simperingham
Generally, parents believe that distracting a child from their upset, ends their upset, hence helps the child to feel better. This belief is constantly reinforced because, without understanding the negative side-effects, distraction appears to be effective in reducing the child’s upset, and thus the child ends their crying and seems to be fine.
However, something that is less understood is that any particular upset has an emotional buildup in the child's body that needs to be released. Children actually need to fully feel and hence fully release every big upset that they have. It can appear that giving them empathy makes it worse because the child may seem to then feel their upset more strongly and the parent can easily mistake this for “making the child more upset”. However, the child needs to feel their upset more fully to get the release. In fact, feeling their feelings more fully is actually very positive and just what’s needed when a child is upset.
According to Dr. Arthur Janov, author of Primal Scream and director of the Primal Institute, a world famous therapy centre in the US: “Repressed early feelings do not disappear. They remain trapped inside and build up a lasting tension throughout the body. This tension drives a person into a continual struggle to symbolically fulfill his childhood needs and frequently brings on depression and anxiety.
Every aspect of his life may suffer — from his work, to his relationship with friends and family, to his overall state of mental and physical health. No matter how hard he tries, an adult cannot satisfy the forgotten needs of his childhood. He can resolve this futile struggle only by re-experiencing the original hurt that has been blocked away from consciousness for so long.”
Because emotions can be big and strong and painful and can be scary, our children need our support and loving connection. They need for us to show them that we can imagine how they are feeling. They need for us to give them the permission, the support and the feeling of safety that they need to feel these big feelings.
If the child’s emotions cause fear, anxiety, anger, resentment or frustration for the parent, this may inhibit and distract the child from feeling and releasing their pain. Although, if a parent has these feelings, but has a bigger feeling of knowing that it’s good that the child is having a big cry and “letting it all out”, then this message will override other feelings as long as the parent can give the child permission with their words, tone and body language. However, when children don’t get the support, empathy and holding that they need to fully feel and release the emotional charge, this charge becomes locked into the emotional body and manifests as an energy block. When this happens continually, this can lead to various problems emotionally and physically.
When a child falls or has an accident of any kind, regardless of why or how it happened, the fact is that the child is hurt and upset and needs and deserves some sympathy and TLC first and foremost. Allowing the child to have a good cry is the most effective healing for big and small wounds. However, in my world as a parent, I daily observe examples of hurt, upset kids being given lectures about what they shouldn’t have done, comments such as “I could see that coming”. Another common response to a child hurting themselves is for the adults involved to ignore the emotional upset and shock and focus only on the physical injury, “ah, it’s just a little scratch, you’ll be fine”. This minimizing, “don’t make a fuss” message often causes a child to feel alone with their upset, the feeling that their parent doesn’t really care and their feelings and also the message that it’s not that bad, i.e. “you shouldn’t be upset”. It's easy to think that a child who falls and hurts her knee is only crying because of the physical fall, but there is the physical pain and also potential feelings of fright, disappointment, anger, frustration, embarrassment or more that also need attention.
When a parent attempts to squash a child’s expression of their upset, it can give the child the message that the parent is ashamed of their expression or that the parent sees their child as weak, wimpish, prone to exaggeration, a drama queen or a fake. This may or may not be what the parent thinks, but if you put yourself in the child’s shoes, you’ll realize that this is inevitably the message that comes across. More often than not, parents (in their genuine care of their child) rush for arnica, plasters and ice-packs rather than giving the child the comfort that they really need. Ironically, allowing the child to express and release their cries is more beneficial to the healing of the wound than the medicine. Releasing the emotional charge is natural healing, natural medicine in it's simplest form.
When a child hurts themselves, it's natural for the parent to have the urge to say things like , “that’s why I told you not to ..... ”. But instead it's better if the parent supports the child emotionally (if they appear to need that) and trust that they are constantly learning from their own experiences.
When a child hurts themselves, the injury itself is a loud and clear message of the consequence of their actions. Children can and do learn from every situation and learn very strongly from actions that result in physical pain as long as we can avoid minimizing their hurt and frustration (it's not that bad, you'll live this time) or worse still, taking the opportunity, to rub it in by berating them for "getting it wrong". If we adults berate the child for the “mistake” that led to the accident, whether we actually tell them it was a stupid thing to do or not, or whether we think it or not, this is more or less the message that the child will get. Sometimes, after being on one of our courses, a parent will go home and ask their child “How does it make you feel when I give out to you for making a mistake?”. Children generally express that it makes them feel put down and thought bad of by their parent. This message and the associated feeling will become internalized in the child relating to this and other such experiences.
This internalized criticical voice of the parent or teacher: The words of the parent/ teacher who the child feels criticized by become words that form part of the child's thoughts. This internalized critical voice can become activated when similar incidents happen. The child may do something "wrong" and immediately hear an angry voice in their head telling them "I'm always naughty", "why didn't I try harder?", "I'm such an idiot", "I always stuff up", depending on the original imprinted message. When this happens, the child will tend to either act out aggressively or become withdrawn.
In the extreme cases where the child is yelled at or physically punished, both the child's withheld rage (especially if they are not allowed to argue back) and the internalized messages of criticism towards their self and the world will have a very strong charge. The extent that the child is expected to not react, but show obedience and respect will determine the extents of the detrimental effects on the child’s energies, their sense of themselves and their sense of the world as a cruel and unaware place.
The kid who has been berated for making a mistake or not living up to the adult’s standards, may then, consciously or unconsciously, want to prove to their parent, and or other adults concerned, that they can do better, that they are focused and diligent and responsible. These pressures, however, rarely have a positive effect because of the level of stress that accompanied the efforts and inevitably lead to the child achieving the opposite result and once again "messing it up". They once again feel like they “got it wrong”, the parent/ teacher once again shows disapproval, the child’s emotional hurt, rejection and frustration build up even more, they try harder, they fail again, the parent/ teacher berates them again (or shows disapproval through ignoring or other means) and on and on year after year and into adult life, unless the child gets help in releasing their backlog of built up hurts, angers and frustrations. The same vicious cycle can continue to play out in every job, with every boss and in every relationship until such a time that the adults decides to change the pattern by changing their own internal dialogue from the critical parent to the kind, empathetic, supportive parent voice.
An example of minimizing a child feelings
I was reminded to write about this issue one day when my son Oisin came in from the street obviously upset. He told us that he had a fall off his bike just outside the house. There was a man walking past, who gave him a telling off, accusing Oisin of not being careful enough and then murmuring a few more annoyed grumpy comments under his breath.
Oisin was so upset that this man didn’t show any concern or sympathy at all for him when he’d obviously got a shock and hurt himself and was now lying on the ground with his legs tangled up in the bike, examining his scratches.
Oisin immediately remembered and recounted that a similar thing happened a couple of years ago on the street outside the house we were living in at the time. The reason Oisin remembered this incident is because of the extent that it negatively affected him at the time. I also remember the incident and how upset he was at the woman’s lack of sympathy for him.
In such a case the adult is assuming an authority role over the child by giving the child a telling off, when they don’t have a right to. In either case, perhaps the adult believed that they were doing the right thing by intervening in a situation where a child needs correcting. But what they are perhaps not taking into consideration is the effect of their intervention on the child's feelings. Perhaps they believe they are being helpful to a child by pointing out “what they’ve just done wrong”, as if the child wouldn’t be aware of the fact unless it was spelled out loud and clear, when they are lying on the ground in pain as a direct consequence of their action. Take a moment to put yourself in the child’s shoes and notice yourself the feelings that would come up for you. In the past there has been an unwritten rule that all adults have the right to boss all children around. This is changing now as children and more people are learning to treat children with the respect that adults expect themselves.
This kind of response can also give the message to children that they shouldn’t do things that will end up in physical injury. Although parents accept that getting hurt and falling is all part of learning and that it is a necessary and positive part of the learning process. But, if we think about it, berating children for going too fast, not looking where they were going, risking taking that jump, and consequently falling tells them that they should not let themselves have accidents. It’s a mixed message. Could an adult learn to ski or any other sport if they were warned from the beginning not to fall or have an accident? Probably not very successfully.
When a child has an accident, it’s in their own best interest to learn from the situation. Children are constantly learning from their actions. Adults complain all the time that their children test the limits. However, it's the child's exact same compulsion to take risks and test the limits that forms the foundation of their intrinsic need to and ability to learn from life situations on a daily basis. It is the child's bravery, intelligence and motivation to learn and improve their skills that pushes them to constantly explore their boundaries, their own boundaries, other's boundaries and life's boundaries in general. They are literally designed to live life to it's limits. They’re out there in the play ground, on the street or in the field constantly doing their tricks on their bikes and skateboards. It’s the equivalent of an adult learning a new sport or any other physically and mentally challenging and potentially dangerous activity.
A few years ago, I learned to ski, which at the time gave me renewed admiration for my children’s lack of fear and inhibitions around learning new skills. For myself, it was exhausting, it was scary, it was exciting, it took immense concentration and focus and motivation, it involved making tons of “mistakes”, falls, even crashes into strangers!! In the meantime, my son who spends his life on bikes, skateboards and surfboards got the hang of it in about ten minutes and then wanted to go up to the highest point his dad would willingly take him, to gracefully glide down the mountain. Back to my clumsy terrified antics, luckily no bones were broken and I got the hang of it in the end. However, I don’t think I would have lasted ten minutes if there was an expert claiming to teach me by pointing out every mistake I made, correcting me with an air of judgment or impatience or anything short of constructive, respectful instruction and encouragement.
Children of every age, from birth onwards, are busy practicing their new skills at the next critical level every day of their lives and for the kids who do have a critical authority figure accusingly pointing out their mistakes, I think it’s amazing they have the passion and motivation to keep going and keep going. As for the kids who give up and retreat from trying new skills, it's not very surprising considering the general lack of respect that many adults have for children when they "get it wrong". Also, who could blame children for developing the skill of zoning out those critical voices to allow them to stay focused on the tasks at hand.
Children are often expected to perform at their optimum without being given any allowance for the negative effects of adults criticism and disapproval. This happens to children all the time.
If however, children are given empathy and emotional support when they crash and are told “hey I really admire your dedication, how you just keep getting back up again and again”, then they’d be likely to have those words come back to them as they go for it again the next time.
Passing our fears on to our kids
As an example, a child falls out of the tree, the parent experiences immediate fear that a bone might be broken or worse. These fears are a huge and uncomfortable part of the parenting role and it can put parents through the ringer. However, all too often, parents feel this fear and act it out on the child by getting angry at the child for causing the parent fear. However, if you think it through, the child doesn’t deserve to get the brunt of their parent's anger, they’re just being a kid, doing exactly what every child has ever done, practicing and improving their skills. If the parent does believe that the child needs to become more aware of their limitations, it's better if the parent firstly gives their child the emotional support they need to recover from the fright they might have just experience and then when the child is feeling better, have a calm constructive chat with them. This would be much more effective. Even better if we can ask them the child “What do you think went wrong there?”, the child is given the opportunity to think it through for themselves.
I have a fear of heights and consequently need to censor my own internal fears. I often want to warn the kids to be careful from that voice of fear inside me, but because I’m very aware that it’s my fear that is not a healthy influence in my life, it’s way more than is needed just to keep me from wandering off the path and lazily walking off the edge of a cliff and plummeting to my death. I’m also very aware that it’s great that my kids don’t have a fear of heights and have the clarity to know that that doesn’t translate into them having no sense of the danger of heights and the need to be careful. Perhaps if I wasn’t so conscious around this particular fear, I would regularly blurt out shock waves of distress and warning to my kids inappropriately all the time and injecting my fear into them that would definitely contribute to throwing them off balance and would probably lead them to having the same fears inevitably.
As a child living on a farm I loved little mice, I thought they were cute furry little things. I have no idea how I did this, but I used to catch little mice in my two hands and bring them into the house to play with them. My mother who has an extreme phobia of mice would instantaneously scream at the top of her lungs and go running faster than she would normally be capable of running and continue screaming. Somebody then bought me a little toy wind up mouse, which I loved and can still smell it’s gorgeous metallic smell. I would then wind it up and send it careering across the kitchen, which would also send my mum screaming and running at the speed of light. We lived on a farm so the mouse issue was a huge issue in our lives for about nine months of the year every year. I don’t know at what point it happened, but needless to say I grew up to be an adult who had an “illogical” fear of mice. I don’t any more, but it took a lot of work to turn it around and bring myself back to being realistic and logical about these furry little characters, taking them out of the huge scary archetype that they represented in my psyche, created of course by my mother’s fear that eventually became more and more internalized in me.
When a parent overreacts to their child hurting themselves
There are many reasons why a parent might overreact to their child getting hurt. The obvious is simply that kids spend a lot of time on the fine line between safe and not safe, just in the same way that adults who are still particularly adventurous and sporty can do. I remember when my first child was a baby and a friend whose kids were older told us that she remembered those early months as “get up in the morning, save your babies life, give them breakfast, save your babies life, have lunch, save your babies life”. I remember us all having a good laugh about it at the time and then quickly noticing just how true it was. My baby was about seven months old at the time, crawling and already investigating everything that he could possibly find. I remember regularly catching him as he tries to dive off the couch once he decided he’d had enough of a breast feed, making a dart for the door as somebody goes out ahead, grabbing him before the door closes on his little fingers. It’s not surprising that some parents become more than a little bit jumpy, even more so these days when there is so much information about the dangers of little ones swallowing and choking on small objects, there is the possibility of severe allergies, peanuts, eggs, etc.
When a mother’s anxiety levels are high, they will often overreact to their child’s threat of danger or their child's inevitable accidents that happen on a daily basis. However, the danger is that, unless the parent is receiving the support that they need to release and process their fears, and instead largely deny their fears, they can easily transfer those fears to their child.
When the parents emotional response is stronger than the child’s in the case of an accident or near accident, then the parent’s feelings tend to take over, which can distract the child from feeling and hence releasing their shock and pain. This emotional overreaction is not just related to the parent who gasps in horror to a minor accident and treats the situation like an emergency, it also relates to the parent who can’t cope with their child expressing emotions and goes to great lengths to make the child stop crying.
Adults often minimize the child's feelings to avoid feeling guilt about causing pain
A father and son were playing a friendly game of soccer at their local sports club. The ball hit the son on the ear from quite a distance, travelling at high speed. The son was understandably stunned and upset. The Dad went straight over to look after his son. The child, who was about 9, was holding his ear and, not crying, but strongly expressing how sore it was with ouches and starting to talk to his dad about what happened. At that moment the adult who’d kicked the ball before it hit him came jogging over saying “it’s ok, it just brushed off the side of your head, it didn’t look too bad,”. The dad stated the fact that the ball hit him on the ear and it was quite a big thud. This was brave of the dad to be honest about the fact that his son was hurt and to resist putting the feelings of the man before his son's. The other man kept insisting, “you’ll be all right mate, don’t worry about it, just get back into the game and you’ll forget about it”, etc etc.
When the dad recounted the story to me he pointed out that the man who hit the ball was more interested in his own feelings, in defending himself against being blamed or his own potential feelings of guilt, he didn’t show any interest at all in the boy's feelings, physical or emotional. The dad said that it would have been more helpful if the man expressed something to the effect of “sorry about that mate” and carrying on. However, neither the father or the son had any need to blame the guy, the boy just needed a bit of time to feel his feelings and let them out when it happened and the dad just needed to create the space to support his son.
So often, adults protect the feelings of the other adults rather than considering the feelings of the child. Because children are dependent on us, vulnerable and have a constant need to develop their sense of safety in the world, we should treat children's feelings with the respect that they deserve and this was a good example of a dad doing just that.
But surely if we give children sympathy when they hurt themselves, they’ll make a mountain out of a molehill?
This is a very common misconception. It’s, once again, based on the underlying belief that children are manipulative and dishonest. With the belief that children want to be in balance, that they want to be strong, confident and independent, it's easier to see that when we help them release their hurt feelings from their bodies, we help them regain balance.
So what is going on with children who are obviously trying it on? We could all see that that other child barely touched them, but my child is on the ground reacting as if she’d just broken her arm. You may think “she’s just looking for attention” and usually when adults say that, it is true. The difference is that this “attention seeking” behaviour is generally frowned upon by adults and it may seem obvious that we shouldn’t play into their games, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be manipulated by them. All of these ways of thinking are completely endemic in our society. These are beliefs and attitudes so common and prolific that we don’t necessarily question them. However, we are always evolving and our view or ourselves and our world is being questioned daily by new information, new studies and through the mixing of different cultures in our society.
Manipulative, attention seeking behaviour can be (a) caused by adults incorrectly judging children to be manipulative and causing them to take on this negative image of themselves, hence loosing their clarity about whether they're really upset or just pretending and (b) the result of their previous needs for comfort and sympathy, love and soothing having not been met and/or (c) is learned behaviour in their home environment.
When a child is acting out attention seeking behaviour, their need for attention and validation of their emotions is always valid.
Quite often, when children seek attention and in manipulative ways, the child has learned that they need to have a good reason for seeking attention. Children should feel supported in expressing their needs at all times, regardless of whether or not the parent can meet those needs. For children who are scorned for seeking attention, the child is given the message that seeking attention is a negative. They may have been made feel that when they seek their parent's attention it causes annoyance and anger to the parent, giving them the message that their needs are too much, are too high, that they are not strong enough, not independent enough, not depending on themselves enough, that they are looking for a back door and refusing to stand on their own two feet, that they are weak, needy, pathetic, wrong, naughty, overbearing, the list goes on. Some of these feelings may sound familiar. Do you feel some or all of these feelings when you have a need to have your feelings heard, understood and validated? This is always a valid need in children and human's. It's a very healthy need.
Unless these messages are changed, these kids will grow up to be adults who can’t ask for the help and support they need. They may grow up to be adults who dislike or hate themselves for needing, wanting or even thinking about getting help from others. They may grow up to be adults who isolate themselves from others for fear of others seeing that they have needs and hence seeing that they are weak, needy, pathetic, etc.
Children who are not given the empathy and support that they need when they’re upset or hurt and not allowed to fully release their hurts and frustrations, will more than likely be kids who hurt themselves more often (a) in an unconscious attempt to get the release that they need (b) because the blocked energy caused by not releasing their emotional charge will literally cause them to be less co-ordinated and balanced and they will consequently be more likely to fall, trip or otherwise cause themselves hurt and (c) because of the accumulation of unreleased emotional charge, their nervous system will be overcharged with stress and their pain threshold will be less, which means that small hurts hurt a lot more than if their nervous system was calm and they felt more solid and secure in their bodies.
Children who hurt themselves in an overt attempt to meet their unmet needs for acknowledgement, validation and release of their emotions, may be in danger of developing much more sever habits of self abuse, self harm and misuse of drugs as teenagers or adults.
The vicious cycle continues in that kids who are not allowed to have the emotional release they need on an ongoing basis and whose parents have a negative attitude to their child being upset, each time the child becomes upset they will immediately have the compounded emotions of feeling the history of hurt and fearing that they are now making it even worse by being upset again and causing their parent to be upset, scared or rejecting again.
Other reasons adults don’t sympathize with kids
Giving them sympathy, gives them the message that we endorse their actions or behaviour. E.g. if the child is crying because they were being rough with the cat and got scratched. Surely if I sympathize with the child I’m telling him/her that I approve of how they were mistreating the cat. If I do this, surely I’m letting the child off the hook and not teaching them how they should treat a cat. The only time that this might hold any truth is when a parent sympathizes with the child and then neglects to talk to the child about what just happened and how it could have been different and better. This may be the case when the child is quite young and hasn’t yet understood what happened. It’s still very important that the conversation about what just happened takes place when that is needed, but no matter how much the child caused their own upset, they still always need and deserve your support.
Often adults don’t give a child sympathy, because they don’t feel any sympathy for the child and don’t believe the child deserves it. The truth is that the adult believes the child shouldn’t be crying. As a society, we’ve been conditioned to believe that as a parent, if you “make a fuss” over every little thing that happens, they’ll never toughen up.
These adults were taught by their parents that they shouldn’t cry and may have be shamed or punished for crying. The opposite is true. The more we support them and validate their feelings, the stronger they become in their sense of their freedom to take life on at full throttle, to feel and release whatever hurts emotional and physical that ensue and to continue to push forth, unburdened by a backlog of emotional repression and complexity in relation to their sense of themselves, their relationship with their parents and their sense of belonging and their total security in their feelings of being loved, honored, supported, cared for by the adults in their world.
For me personally, if I had a dollar for every time I heard my father say to me or one of my siblings, “cry and I’ll give you something to cry for”, I’d be a very rich woman. The reality is that having transcended all the consequent hardness towards myself and others that this conditioning created has brought endless richness into my relationships. In my heart of hearts, I want others to experience this richness that comes from liberating the hardness and hatred in our hearts from having our childhood hurts, big or small invalidated, repressed and mocked.
Some parents are sympathetic when they believe that the cause of their upset was bad enough. Parents constantly make the call on whether or not they believe the child’s upset is valid or not. Parents are quick to tell a crying child “you’re ok, you’re ok”, “come on, it’s not that bad”, “no, no, it was an accident, she didn’t mean to hurt you”, “ok look, it’s just a little scratch”, “you’re ok, you’ll live this time” or “do we need to ring the ambulance, do we?”
When we discipline kids is as important as how we speak to kids
Trying to engage the child in a logical debrief of where they went wrong when the child is upset because of the accident, fight or fright that just happened, generally doesn’t work because (a) when we’re upset, we literally can’t think straight, emotions and logic occupy different parts of the brain, (b) our parent’s lack of sympathy for us gives us more to be upset about, angry at them, angry at ourselves, feeling stupid or ashamed for being upset when our parent is communicating through their lack of empathy that they think we’re overreacting and (c) the learning from the situation that just happened largely comes through the feeling and releasing of the emotions that the situation brought up, when we interrupt the emotions, we also interrupt the clarity and insights that would have come through in due course.
Language of co-operation versus language of conflict
There is now much more awareness about the language we use when we discipline our kids and I believe that we are, as a society, improving the messages we give to our children. In certain circles, there is now a growing awareness to differentiate between the child’s actions and the child. “Oh, look at you, you’ve covered yourself in mud from head to toe” as opposed to “look at you, you’re a mess”. “It would be great Sue if you would put the bowl of crisps on the table so that everybody can share them” as opposed to “you’re so selfish sitting there scoffing that big bowl of crisps”.
I’ve observed that many parents take this differentiation and then deduct that even though it’s pretty rough to say to a child “you’re so stupid for doing that”, that telling the child “well, that was a stupid thing to do” is ok and that the child knows that it was the action that was a stupid thing to do as opposed to they were stupid for doing it. Another example is “it’s very naughty to snatch things from other kids”, as opposed to “don’t snatch things, you naughty child”. I’ll grant that there may be a marginal improvement in separating out the action from the child, but I still view this kind of language to have a negative effect, that it would hurt the child’s feelings, which is never a positive thing to do.
To gain a clear perspective on this issue, bring to mind an incident where you did something that you’re partner, parent, mother in law (or other person you have a close relationships with) was a bit annoyed about. Perhaps, you were cooking a meal, but sat in front of the telly to watch a particularly exciting part of one of your regular soaps. You became so engrossed that you forgot about the dinner until you smelled that smell we all hate of food burning on the bottom of a saucepan. You’re partner walks in, sees that the food is burned and says “you’re so stupid for burning the food”. How do you feel? How are you going to feel the next time you’re cooking them a meal?
However, this time, the same scenario, but when you’re partner, parent or mother in law walks in they say “well that was a stupid thing to do”. How do you feel? Do you feel that they are referring to the “thing” that you did, but not thinking anything negative about you and not wishing you to feel anything negative towards yourself? Or, do you basically feel like you’ve just been accused of being stupid??
Misbehaviour is not a word I’ve ever used in my communications with my kids, because the word itself isn’t a very friendly one. If the leader or facilitator of a group that you’re involved in, told you they wanted to have a quiet word with you about your “misbehaviour” at last week’s group, how would you feel? Bring to mind a situation and let yourself visualize this happening and close your eyes and observe how you feel. Can you imagine that those charged feelings might make it more difficult to hear what this person has to say in a positive light? This is the same for our kids.
Naughty. This is another word I’ve never used in my vocabulary as a parent. The truth is that I don’t think like this. There are times when I’m aware that another person might think this of my child, which is then a very loud silent message across the room “you’re child is so naughty for being silly, etc”. But, it’s just not how I see kids. I believe that kids are inherently good. I know that most parents would believe that they also believe that kids are inherently good, but if that really is true, then I believe that we need to change our language so that we give our children this message. If you believe this, but you’re using words like “naughty”, then I believe that you’re giving you’re child very mixed messages.
Repeating the above exercise exchanging the word naughty for the word misbehaviour. You were invited to have a conversation about your naughty behaviour at last week’s group. Ok, I’ll admit this is a ridiculous idea because adults don’t speak to other adults in this way. So, why is this word ok to use
Speaking to a child about what they did wrong and keeping the focus in the negative is likely to reinforce their negative image of themselves as somebody who is mean, selfish, stupid, etc and more likely to consequently make it harder for the child to not repeat the undesirable behaviour. Talking to a child in a relaxed, calm, but serious manner about how it could have been different is helping to take the weight off the child’s shoulder and supporting them to learn and change their behaviour for the better, which will make them feel good about themselves. Again, to really gain a body feeling for the difference between these two slightly different approaches, just put yourself in the child’s shoes, or think about how you like to be spoken to when somebody is pointing out your “wrongs”.
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