A child’s job in a family system is to explore and learn, through experiencing and expressing their emotions and wants. Kids need to learn what they are capable of, what is safe, what their role in the family is, how much autonomy they have, and what happens when they try new things.

Now you have your job description: keep your child safe, emotionally and physically, using boundaries, validation, and empathy.

Why do boundaries, validation, and empathy help a child build regulation skills? Boundaries show our kids that even the biggest emotions won’t spiral out of control forever. Children

While empathy and validation certainly make kids feel good inside, their functions actually go much deeper. One of the primary goals of childhood is to build healthy emotion regulation skills: to develop ways to have feelings and manage them, to learn how to find yourself amid feelings and thoughts and urges, rather than have feelings and thoughts

When we receive validation from others, we start to regulate our own experience because we “borrow” someone’s communication of realness; when we receive invalidation, we almost always get further dysregulated and escalated, because now we have the experience of being told we are not real inside. Very few things feel as awful as this.

our jobs don’t stop at protecting our children’s physical safety—we are also their emotional caretakers. This is where two other important job duties come in: validation and empathy. Validation is the process of seeing someone else’s emotional experience as real and true, rather than seeing someone else’s emotional experience as something we want

Boundaries are not what we tell kids not to do; boundaries are what we tell kids we will do. Boundaries embody your authority as a parent and don’t require your child to do anything.

There’s nothing as scary to a child as noticing when their parent fails at this job (especially when that failure stems from a parent’s fear of their kid’s reaction). The child receives the subconscious message: when you are out of control, there’s no one capable of stepping in and helping you. Of course, your kid won’t thank you for stepping in

Parents have the job of establishing safety through boundaries, validation, and empathy. Children have the job of exploring and learning, through experiencing and expressing their emotions. And when it comes to jobs, we all have to stay in our lanes. Our kids should not dictate our boundaries and we should not dictate their feelings.