Every Feeling Gets a Seat at the Table: Radical Acceptance for Kids

Happy Love Day. To honor my favorite holiday of the year, here is a lengthy post for you to mull over. Summary statement if you don't have the bandwidth to finish: before your child can name what they feel, they have to be allowed to feel it — and that starts with your calm, your presence, and your willingness to let every feeling have a seat at the table.

There's a moment I see again and again in my work with families. A child is crying — hard, messy, inconvenient crying — and the well-meaning adult nearby does one of two things: they rush to fix it, or they try to talk the child out of it. You're okay. There's nothing to cry about. Let's think about something happy instead.

The intention is love. But the message the child receives is something different: That feeling you're having? It's too much. Put it away.

This is where radical acceptance — a concept rooted in the work of Tara Brach — has something profound to offer families. And when we pair it with what Dr. Mona Delahooke teaches us about the nervous system, it becomes more than a philosophy. It becomes a practice with a body.

What Radical Acceptance Actually Means (and What It Doesn't)

Radical acceptance is the practice of meeting reality — including the painful, uncomfortable, inconvenient parts — without trying to push it away or pretend it's something else. For adults, Brach describes this as learning to be present with our own suffering instead of running from it. For kids, it starts with something simpler and more foundational: the experience of having their feelings met without judgment by the people they trust most.

This doesn't mean anything goes. Acceptance isn't permissiveness. You can hold a firm boundary — I won't let you hit your sister — while simultaneously honoring what's underneath the behavior — You're really frustrated right now, and that makes sense.

The distinction matters. When a child feels accepted in their emotional experience, even as we guide their behavior, they learn something essential: I am not my worst moment. My feelings are information, not evidence that something is wrong with me.

Before They Can Name It, They Have to Feel It

Here's where Delahooke's research changes the conversation. Most of the advice we hear about emotional literacy focuses on naming feelings — give your child a feelings chart, teach them to say "I'm angry" or "I'm scared," practice identifying emotions in storybooks. And that's all valuable. But it assumes something that isn't always true: that a child can actually feel what's happening in their body in the first place.

Delahooke calls this interoception — the internal sense that gives us information about our body's state. It's what lets us notice a tight chest, a racing heart, a clenched jaw, a stomach that feels like it's falling. For some children, this sense is well-developed and they can connect those sensations to emotional labels fairly easily. For others — especially children with ADHD, autism, sensory processing differences, or trauma histories — interoception is murky or muted. They may know something feels wrong but have no idea what, where, or why.

If we skip straight to "name your feeling and pick a strategy," we're asking some kids to do something they don't have the wiring for yet. It's like asking someone to read a map in a language they haven't learned.

Radical acceptance starts here — not with words, but with the body. It starts with a child being allowed to have the sensation without being rushed past it.

The Nervous System Underneath

Delahooke's work, grounded in Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory, gives us a framework for understanding what's happening beneath the surface when a child is struggling. She describes three pathways:

The green pathway is where a child feels safe, connected, and socially engaged. This is where learning, communication, and emotional awareness happen. When kids are in the green, they can reflect, problem-solve, and accept comfort.

The red pathway is the fight-or-flight response — the nervous system detecting threat and mobilizing the body for survival. A child in the red may look defiant, aggressive, hyperactive, or panicked. But what they are is overwhelmed.

The blue pathway is shutdown — the nervous system's last-resort response when fight or flight hasn't worked. A child in the blue may look withdrawn, spacey, compliant on the surface, or emotionally flat. They're not calm. They're collapsed.

Here's what this has to do with radical acceptance: you cannot accept a feeling you cannot access. And a child in the red or blue pathway does not have reliable access to their thinking brain. They are not choosing to melt down or shut down. Their nervous system is doing what it was designed to do in the face of perceived threat.

When we meet that child with acceptance rather than correction — when we say, through our words and our body language and our own regulated presence, I see you. You're safe. I'm here — we are doing something neurobiological. We are helping their nervous system shift back toward the green pathway, where feeling and naming and accepting become possible.

That is co-regulation. And it is the mechanism through which radical acceptance actually lands for a child.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Start with your own body. Before you try to help your child with what they're feeling, notice what's happening in yours. Are your shoulders tight? Is your breathing shallow? Is there heat in your chest? Brach's practice of pausing — what she calls the "sacred pause" — is powerful here. You don't have to be perfectly calm. You just have to be aware enough to choose your next move rather than react.

Describe what you notice, not what you think they should feel. Instead of "You seem angry," try "I notice your hands are in fists and your breathing is really fast." This does two things: it builds your child's interoceptive awareness, and it communicates acceptance without requiring the child to label anything before they're ready. You're being their mirror, not their corrector.

Resist the fix. This is the hardest one. When your child is hurting, every instinct says to make it better — to offer a solution, a distraction, a reframe. But sometimes the most accepting thing you can do is simply stay. I'm right here. You don't have to be different than you are right now. Children who are given space to feel their feelings all the way through — without being rushed or redirected — build a deeper capacity for emotional resilience than children who are taught to manage their feelings away.

Hold the boundary and the feeling at the same time. Radical acceptance doesn't mean letting a child throw things at the wall without response. It means separating the behavior from the feeling. I can't let you throw that, and I can see how frustrated you are. Both of those things are true at the same time. This is what Delahooke means when she says behavior is the signal, not the target. You address the behavior. You honor what's underneath.

Let acceptance be imperfect. You will not do this perfectly. You will lose your patience. You will say the wrong thing. You will realize, mid-sentence, that you're lecturing when you meant to listen. That's okay. Brach's entire framework rests on the understanding that acceptance is a practice, not a destination. And when you model the ability to notice your own misstep, repair it, and try again, you are teaching your child the most radical form of self-acceptance there is: I am a work in progress, and that's allowed.

Acceptance Grows Outward

Children who feel accepted in their homes — not for performing wellness, but in their full, messy, complicated emotional reality — are children who can extend that acceptance to others. They become the kid who isn't rattled by a classmate who stims or flaps. The kid who can sit with a friend who's crying without needing to fix it. The kid who is curious about difference rather than threatened by it.

This doesn't happen because we taught them a lesson about diversity. It happens because acceptance was modeled in their body, in their nervous system, in the thousands of small moments where someone met them exactly where they were and said: This feeling is welcome here. You are welcome here.

A Note on the Hard Days

If you're reading this and thinking, "But what about when I can't do any of this? What about when I'm the one who's dysregulated?" — that's not failure. That's being human. Delahooke is clear that parents' nervous systems matter too. Your capacity to offer acceptance to your child is directly connected to whether you are receiving acceptance yourself — from your partner, your community, your own inner voice.

Brach writes about the practice of offering yourself the same compassion you'd offer a close friend. On the hard days, radical acceptance might look like this: I am exhausted. I did not handle that well. And I can try again tomorrow. Your child doesn't need you to be perfect. They need you to be real, to be present, and to keep coming back.

That's the practice. And it's enough.

Love,

Erin