Why telling her daughter she wasn't scared of clowns never once worked

One Saturday, Eliza burst into her parents' bedroom sobbing, hands down at her sides, which her mother knew meant this was real crying, not the performed kind. People always pay attention to Eleanor, she said, but nobody ever pays any attention to me. Gretchen Rubin's first instinct was to argue the facts: what about last night's five games of Uno? Didn't Eliza know everyone loved her just as much as her little sister?

She held the words back, remembering a resolution she'd built from reading child psychologists Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, whose central lesson was simple and, it turned out, hard to actually practice: acknowledge the reality of people's feelings. Instead of contradicting her daughter, she said, wow, that hurts your feelings, you feel ignored. She said it again a moment later, in slightly different words. Eliza quieted, then asked what she should do. Rubin didn't rush to solve it. That's a tough question, she said. You, Daddy, and I will give it some serious thought. When they stood up, Eliza hugged her hard and went off cheerfully with her father.

Rubin realized, once she started paying attention, how often she'd been doing the opposite: you're not afraid of clowns, you can't possibly want more Legos, you never play with the ones you have, you're not hungry, you just ate. Each one denied the feeling rather than naming it, and each one, predictably, produced more resistance, not less. Faber and Mazlish's research suggested a reason: a huge share, roughly eighty-five percent, of what adults say to children is negative, in the form of no, stop, or don't, so a child's frustration often has less to do with being told no and more to do with feeling unheard in the first place.

The technique wasn't limited to children. Her husband, Jamie, skeptical of parenting books in general, picked it up anyway. When their younger daughter threw herself on the floor over her shoes, he simply said, you're frustrated, you don't want to wear your shoes, you want to wear your ruby slippers. She stopped crying. Denying a bad feeling, it turns out, tends to intensify it. Naming it, oddly, lets it start to pass.

Try this the next time someone close to you, a child, a partner, a colleague, says something that sounds like an overreaction. Before you correct them with facts, put the feeling into words out loud: that really frustrated you, or you feel like this isn't fair. If the moment calls for it, write the complaint down on paper, or say plainly that the task in front of them genuinely is hard, rather than insisting it's easy. Hold off on offering comfort, advice, or a fix until after you've named the feeling and let it land. Watch what happens next, since more often than expected, the person softens on their own, and only then are they ready to actually hear a solution.