From Avoidance to Acceptance: How ACT Can Help Families Embrace Emotions
As millennial parents, many of us grew up in a world that didn't always encourage emotional expression. We were often taught to "stay strong," "push through," or even "just get over it." Many of us were taught to suppress emotions with unhealthy coping strategies like late night ice cream. These messages, whether implicit or explicit, taught us to avoid our emotions rather than experience them. As a result, we may find ourselves feeling disconnected from our emotions or unsure how to support our children in navigating theirs.
However, as parents, we know how essential it is to foster a healthy emotional environment for our children—one where they feel safe to express themselves and learn to navigate their feelings. This is where Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) can play a transformative role in our lives and the lives of our kids.
Understanding Experiential Avoidance
Experiential avoidance is the habit of pushing away or ignoring unpleasant emotions, or the experiences that trigger those emotions. Many millennial parents may recognize this tendency in themselves. When we were children, expressing emotions like sadness, anger, or fear might have been met with phrases like "don't cry" or "you're fine." This kind of emotional invalidation, however well-intentioned, teaches us to distrust or avoid our emotions rather than understand and experience them.
As adults, this learned avoidance can manifest as anxiety, stress, or a sense of disconnection from our feelings—and can make parenting even more challenging. We might find ourselves inadvertently repeating the cycle, urging our children to suppress their emotions instead of exploring them as a way to avoid the emotions that come with difficult parenting situations.
How ACT Can Help
Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) offers a different approach. ACT strategies encourage us to accept our emotions—without judgment or avoidance—and commit to actions that align with our values. Instead of seeing emotions as "good" or "bad," we see them as natural responses that provide valuable information about our needs and experiences. Our job is not to end our children’s uncomfortable emotions. Instead, it is to support them through it. One of the biggest mindset shifts I ask of parents is to let go of the need to stop their children’s uncomfortable emotions.
Here are some ways ACT can support parents in fostering a healthier relationship with emotions:
Acceptance Over Avoidance: ACT can help parents embrace their emotions rather than avoid them. By practicing acceptance, we can model for our children that all emotions are valid and that it's okay to feel deeply.
Mindfulness Practices: ACT incorporates mindfulness techniques that encourage present-moment awareness. This helps us and our children to notice emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them. Mindfulness allows us to pause and reflect rather than react impulsively to emotional experiences.
Defusion Techniques: ACT strategies can help us distance ourselves from unhelpful thoughts and feelings without getting tangled up in them. For example, instead of thinking "I am a bad parent," we learn to reframe it as "I'm having the thought that I'm a bad parent." This small shift helps us see our thoughts as just thoughts, not truths, which can reduce their emotional impact.
Values-Driven Actions: ACT can help parents to identify their core values and make parenting decisions that align with those values. For instance, if one of our values is compassion, we might choose to respond to our child's emotions with empathy and understanding rather than frustration or anger.
Building Psychological Flexibility: Perhaps most importantly, ACT fosters psychological flexibility—the ability to stay present and open to our experiences, even when they are difficult. This flexibility allows us to respond to our children's needs with greater patience, empathy, and understanding.
Creating an Emotionally Supportive Family Environment
Integrating ACT principles into our parenting can help us create family environments where emotions are not something to be feared or avoided, but welcomed and explored. We can teach our children that it's okay to feel a wide range of emotions and that they are not alone in their emotional experiences.
When we model acceptance and commitment to our values, we provide our children with a powerful blueprint for navigating their own emotions and building resilience. We can end the cycle of emotional avoidance and embrace a new approach—one that fosters connection, understanding, and psychological safety for ourselves and our kids.
