The Role of Maternal Emotional Validation and Invalidation on Children's Emotional Awareness

Abstract

Emotional awareness-that is, accurate emotional self-report-has been linked to positive well-being and mental health. However, it is still unclear how emotional awareness is socialized in young children. This observational study examined how a particular parenting communicative style-emotional validation versus emotional invalidation-was linked to children's (age 4-7 years) emotional awareness. Emotional validation was defined as accurately and nonjudgmentally referring to the emotion or the emotional perspective of the child. The relationship between maternal emotional validation/invalidation and children's awareness of their negative emotions was examined in 65 mother-child pairs while playing a game. In a multiple regression, significant predictors of children's emotional awareness were their mother's degree of emotional validation, the child's gender (girls more aware than boys), and their mother's degree of invalidation (negative predictor). These results suggest that children's accurate attention to their own emotion states-that is, their emotional awarenessmay be shaped by their mother's use of emotional validation/invalidation.

Gender Differences in Depression Literacy and Stigma After a Randomized Controlled Evaluation of a Universal Depression Education Program

“…One experimental study of maternal emotional validation and invalidation examined the degree to which mothers validate male and female children and which emotions they validate. Mothers in that study tended to validate daughters more than sons and to validate sad emotions over expressions of anger; emotional validation was the strongest predictor of children's own emotional awareness 33 and girls were more emotionally aware than boys. However, many of the items on the ADKQ are behaviorally anchored (for example, "the abuse of alcohol and drugs can be a sign of depression"); as such, the ability to recognize sad feelings as a core component of depression does not fully explain females' advantage in depression knowledge in our study.…”

The role of mother's prenatal substance use disorder and early parenting on child social cognition at school age

“…Fonagy et al (2012) (see also Luyten & Fonagy, 2015) differentiated between self‐ and other‐directed mentalization as two neurally separate but intertwined abilities of understanding one's own and other people's emotions and other mental states. Typically, maltreated children may become highly vigilant of others' emotions, especially negative ones but may not adequately learn to understand their own emotions, which have rarely elicited caregiver attention (Fonagy et al, 2012; Lambie & Lindberg, 2016).…”

A qualitative study of the emotional coping and support needs of children living with a parent with a brain injury

“…And some children explicitly denied any loss when asked, despite mentioning losses elsewhere in their interview. This is interesting because generally research with children from normal populations finds the opposite -that sadness is more easily reported than anger [17]. This could be a quirk of our sample, but it is also plausible that the ambiguity of the loss suffered by these children makes sadness difficult to acknowledge.…”