The need for validation

[Outhere]

I was talking with my 13 year old niece about her friends and she commented that one of them was so popular because she was 'so validating'. I asked what that meant in real terms and whether she could give me an example and she said she wasn't sure but there's 'just something about her'. I thought the phrase was really interesting and reflected on language and how I may have thought about the qualities my friends had at that age. Validation certainly wouldn't have come into it and I think I would have considered a good friend as someone who I could have fun with and probably someone who was loyal.

I'm curious as to when 'validation' became 'a thing'. I know it is oft used in slogans in reference to gender and I have to profess that I'm unsure what the act of validation looks like, or why it has become so important to some people. Do people really need others to validate them? If so, what does that look like, and why? When did our sense of self become so reliant on others approval? I was also thinking about other phrases which I find bizarre too, like 'speak your truth'. Again, I don't think I really understand what this means. What truth am I speaking if it's not my own?

I've been pondering whether the rise of the internet is partly why this language has evolved; in a world where a quick like or emoji supports your position, or confirms that you look good in your picture. Neither of which take any more effort than a cursory glance and action, nor require much thinking. Is that validation? And why is there such a drive to seek this? And does this feed into the distinct lack of critical thinking that appears present on many SM platforms? I see a lot of slogans and phrases that get thrown out as statements, that don't appear to mean anything but garner many likes and support.

Apologies for my ramblings, it's not entirely sex/gender related, but could easily be applied to it. I guess what I'm asking is how have we got here and why is there such a desire for other people to 'validate' others? It feels very alien to me, however that may be because I'm of 'an age' where I have a secure sense of self and couldn't imagine needing someone else to approve of this.

All I can remember is GCSE computer studies, exhorting me to 'validate the data'! Validation sounds like yet another meaningless buzz word, like woke.

Sorry, I am very cynical

I expect it means "agrees with everyone".

In my day a good friend would come shopping with you and tell you that your bum looked big in it. Now that's considered to be "bitchy", a good friend has to like everything you do (like in words and "like" online, both are demanded).

The trouble is that the result of unquestioning validation by parents and peers is that many children don't develop resilience, can't cope with criticism and appear to be unable to form their own opinions and stick with them.

So, if someone is good at validating others my guess would be that means good at making complimentary statements which assist narcissists in maintaining the illusion of the false self?

Flattery is now a desirable quality in a friend?

Yeah OP I do think that the rise of the internet has a lot to answer for, particularly regarding the corruption of the English language and the normalisation of traits which we previously frowned on as a society due to them being considered narcissistic.

We have had a bit of a vacuum in explicit moral teachings since the decline of religion- I am not religious and I do not argue for a mass return to patriarchal religions - “memes” and slogans on social media have filled that vacuum I fear but they tend to promote an incoherent and often contradictory set of of superficial “values” which are not bound to any particular ethical framework such as a religion or philosophy which we could then analyse and make reasoned decisions about following/promoting or not.

It is almost like making some sort of moral teaching out of trite slogans from a card shop.

Yes I do think it contributes to the lack of critical thinking apparently so prevalent now. Although perhaps there was always a dearth of critical thinking, only in past times people were mindlessly repeating what they were told by mainstream religions and by the other powers that be. We have had a lot of rapid changes and so the mindlessness of society is really standing out for some of us at the moment.

Ah, I'm glad I'm not the only one who's sceptical!

I agree also about the narcissism. There seems to be an awful lot of naval gazing going on. Historically you'd be told to get your head out of your arse, but nowadays it seems positively encouraged. How do we then, encourage a generation to develop resilience? If my friend doesn't tell me arse looks big in something, and only positively affirms everything about me, how can do I develop the skills to deal with negativity? I guess I'm straying into 'be kind' territory now.

I caught a clip from Love Island the other day that had my jaw open. A guy said he didn't like 'fake girls' ie plastic surgery and 'fake behaviour'. He got admonished by one of the other contestants who told him that he didn't understand why she'd had work done and told him off for judging her. He ended up in tears and practically had to beg for forgiveness, it was all about 'educating himself'. From what I can gather the comment had been made during a game and he'd been asked what he didn't find attractive in women. And yet when he stated his preference, he was basically told he wasn't allowed to have this preference, or that his preference wasn't acceptable. It was utterly bizarre.

My child is approaching her teenage years. It'll be interesting to see whether she buys into this language or not.

[Rant switch ON]
I suspect I know what your niece means, OP. I'm 60, cynical, battle-scarred and when I say thank you or I tell you I rated what you did/said, I mean it.

I'm currently on 19 What's App groups and too many of them, even the GC resister-type ones, include loads of 'lovely' women who never let a message go by without telling the person who sent it that they're wonderful, they love them for ever and adding sickly little self-help book truisms and memes that make me want to break things.

All these women are competing to outshine each other in the loveliness stakes. I can't bear it. And these are feminist women who should be able to see through this shit. They take my failure to respond in the same fashion as vaguely offensive. I just say I don't play that particular game.

I'm shedding contacts and even friends because I'm not seen to be super-agreeable online. I just say thanks when I should be saying super-agreeable lovely thanks in special words with knobs on.

I use WA/ Messenger to communicate information and opinions. Not to buoy up other peoples' egos and validate them. WTF is happening to people?
[Rant switch OFF]

It's interesting. I'm doing a course where some of the students are 20 years younger than me.

I made some innocuous comment when the Harry and Megan interview came out about rich people airing their dirty laundry in public and was told that their interview was perfectly valid because they were "speaking their truth"

I understand what it means but there's a vast difference between "their truth" and "the truth". I fear I am too old for this brave new world

This a thread from some time back on this very topic. Might be useful to you.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3881259-To-be-valid?pg=1

When did our sense of self become so reliant on others approval?

Has it not always been somewhat dependent on others? People have always gone along with the prevailing fashion. Have you never felt insecure and wanted some reassurance from others?

I do believe we need to encourage critical thinking, not baby our kids, end cancel culture and allow children to experience failure and discomfort sometimes. I also believe we should support and nurture people.

It's very easy to hark back to the good old days with rose tinted glasses but was it really that great?

More women's work, eh?

This is a feminist board. The Be Kind board is elsewhere.

Interesting. Very! I suspect all this validation cane about when people started counting "likes" and investing
their online image and popularity with their self-esteem.

When I was young - and now for that matter - my "validation" came from things like exam results, feedback on an essay I'd slaved over, having my ideas and views listened to and built on in tutorials, being appointed at interview, promoted at work and having a group of good friends who enjoyed my company and colleagues who sought me out to socialise and laugh with them.

Love of a partner and children mattered and matters, but it doesn't need splashing all over social media! To this day, my Insta has zero pictures of me; just images of things I've seen, sewn, grown, made, restored or even cooked.

My DH has no social media but has grasped that "likes" matter in this area. He'll sometimes ask how many "likes" I've had and I tell him honestly that I have no idea. I'm more interested in what people say than how many of them clicked on something.

I'm behind the times I know,

The best validation of all is when someone tells me that something I suggested or showed them in their professional role worked, and that they've passed it on to colleagues and it's become part of everyone's practice. Or when an old friend remembered something I'd said that had helped her through a really bad time many years back. I couldn't even remember saying it, but it sounded like me. And when my adult children forgive me for all the mistakes I made when they were small (and not so small) and still want to spend time with me. 😉

@Shedbuilder

More women's work, eh?

This is a feminist board. The Be Kind board is elsewhere.

Nope, not necessarily women's work.

I would have thought that building girls and women up instead of tearing them down would be a feminist thing to do.

I think we are probably classified as stoics, NewlyGranny. Our self-esteem comes from within. Much better for us, psychologically, than relying on the external world to buoy us up and keep telling us how wonderful we are.

Who's tearing anyone down, Gingerkittycat? I'm kind, polite and a good friend. I do good deeds. But I don't need to be told I'm a goddess and will be adored forever simply for saying I'll read an article someone's planning to post or for dropping some groceries round, or taking someone's dog for a walk. And it worries me that so many capable, professional women seem to feel the need to play this desperate 'like me, like me' game.

Did you see the documentary about Belle Gibson, the influencer who introduced the world to clean eating?

www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/b2538e04-87f5-4af5-bd6f-f6cf88b488c4

Created a beautiful perfect idealised world in which everyone was lovely and living their best life. Turned out to be totally fake. The women who were conned would tell you now that strength needs to come from within.

How come everyone can speak the truth except middle-aged women?

I think it's not "building them up" to tell them that everything they do is fantastic, that every aspect is beautiful, that all their opinions are valid. Encouragement is good, uncritical acceptance not so good.

I'm also too old (in my opinion) for social media. I can't be doing with having to complement people on their food choices or forwarded amusing or uplifting sayings [cynical]

@HollowTalk

How come everyone can speak the truth except middle-aged women?

Yup. We speak our truth and we're threatened, no-platformed, removed from Twitter and told we're terfs...

Who's tearing anyone down, Gingerkittycat?

It seems like this thread is based on totally trashing the younger generation and their values while pretending that us older generation were all strong minded independent women who didn't care what other people thought. I was also a strong minded young woman who cared about exams and mucis but also had a dodgy perm and then became a goth in order to fit in.

I've got a huge extended family with many nieces and cousins kids (mostly girls) who are teenagers and young adults and I don't think it is fair to tar them all with the same brush. When my DD was a blue-haired teenager who said she was non binary was she really so different as teenage me trying to fit in.

I caught a clip from Love Island the other day that had my jaw open. A guy said he didn't like 'fake girls' ie plastic surgery and 'fake behaviour'.

Poor guy, I wonder how he ended up on Love Island? :o

But yes he has a right to his opinion, and it could have been in interesting chat with people explaining their reasons, and others why they find it offputting, if people had enough inner strength to accept that not everyone has to like, praise and agree with them or else they are being “offensive”.

I’m another like you lot, older, been around the block and got my “validation” from hard work, effort and accepting that not everyone has to like me to be able to like myself. I do think vacuous, insincere praise and gushing have always existed, it’s just that in the past they weren’t generally seen as unquestionably a good thing that indicated your worth, and you learned quite early on that some people didn’t mean it or in some situations it was required but wasn’t “real”. But with social media likes and praise being required all the time, that distinction has kind of faded.

I hope I’m bringing my DC up to respect disagreement and understand that a sense of yourself and what you can do isn’t just about being liked, validated etc. But my DD especially is surrounded by friends who see things like this.

Maybe this generation will still go through the process of getting older and giving less of a shit though, as we have. Reality tends to bite sooner or later, when you go through tough times you find out who really cares, achieving difficult things gives you more of a genuine sense of self-worth - and they can still experience these things.

When teenage you was trying to fit in you still had to be polite to the adults around you, you had to listen to their opinions on your teenage fads, you had to accept the reality that punk/emo/whatever dress code might not be in line with an income generating job, and you had to realise that there are many opinions in the world and that yours wasn't necessarily the correct or only one.

That's how you grew up.

Some young people (and I'm stressing the some, by the way) are never contradicted, they never question their own opinions, they are validated in their choices, and either they continue in ignorance or they get a bloody big shock when they leave university and there are no longer safe spaces, and cancel culture, and people telling them they are right all the time. They live life as though they are on twitter, with a blocklist of unpleasant realities in place.

In the long run it is very harmful to unquestioningly validate the opinions of youngsters. The majority of the real world won't; they need some preparation.

It’s not tearing young women down to lament that they are all expected to constantly validate each other and praise each other’s appearance.

But I do agree that younger people and especially teens have a less secure sense of self by definition, and in most people it grows over time and you become less reliant on the validation of others, and that’s always been the case - in many women at least.

Having said that I cringe at the attention-seeking / validation-seeking things some people I know put on Twitter, including older ones.

@Gingerkittykat

Who's tearing anyone down, Gingerkittycat?

It seems like this thread is based on totally trashing the younger generation and their values while pretending that us older generation were all strong minded independent women who didn't care what other people thought. I was also a strong minded young woman who cared about exams and mucis but also had a dodgy perm and then became a goth in order to fit in.

I've got a huge extended family with many nieces and cousins kids (mostly girls) who are teenagers and young adults and I don't think it is fair to tar them all with the same brush. When my DD was a blue-haired teenager who said she was non binary was she really so different as teenage me trying to fit in.

Can you show me anywhere on this thread where anyone has accused all young people of being like this? I'm 60 and a great many of the people I referred to are well over 40 and in some cases my own age.

It would be good to have a proper debate about the psychology behind this need for validation instead of being told we're 'tearing girls and women down' and that we're trashing the younger generation en masse, which simply aren't true, Ginger.

I keep hearing experts on the TV and radio saying we need to build resilience in younger people. I think we can all see how challenging life is for girls and young women these days and I'm very glad not to be an 18-year-old at the moment.

As others here have said, strength and validation comes from inner confidence, not in how many likes you get, or how hyperbolically someone compliments you. How did we let this creep up on us and not notice what was happening? How do we get out of it?

I agree resilience is a good quality to have, but I don’t like how it’s been adopted by schools (well ours anyway) as a Thing you have to teach children, like they are always being told to be resilient. But actually terrible things like abuse, bereavement and severe bullying do happen to kids and in some cases it’s OK to be upset and need support, so blanket telling people they have to be resilient isn’t helpful IMO.

Resilience, confidence, and internal self-worth come from a process, of understanding that not everyone agrees with you, that you can achieve things through effort, you can recover from setbacks. Also from being treated with genuine respect.

I agree LadyBonnibel; children need support about real life issues which is something we didn't get much of back in the 70s. Unfortunately the pendulum seems to have swung too far, leading to children being unquestioningly supported about everything.

I would hate to be a teenager now, especially a teenage girl. But I do think that supportive honesty is better than unquestioning validation, because the real world is going to be a heck of a shock.

Too true, Shedbuilder!

And I think a generation back we might, as a culture, have got a little carried away with telling children they could be anything they wanted to be if they put their minds to it.

That message should have come with a caveat about certain immutable things, but we probably didn't think we needed to tell them the obvious.

Turns out we should have done. 🤦🏼‍♀️

I agree with Shed. Obviously everyone needs a circle of support. But it's an important part of life to grasp that you can't expect support from everywhere and there are times when, because you're wrong, even your support circle will need to tell you to pull your socks up, and they're not really supporting you if they say you look amazing but don't mention your skirt is tucked in your knickers.

I wonder if the 'all must have prizes' aspect of education in recent years has anything to do with some of it.