Teaching Emotional Regulation Skills and Self-Control
Lots of children can struggle to learn to regulate their own emotions. It is a difficult process and happens gradually in early and mid-childhood.
As children learn to regulate their emotions they form connections between the ‘thinking’ parts of their brain and the ‘feeling’ parts. They can only really do this if they actually get to practice dealing with real emotions. For this reason, we can’t avoid all difficult emotions that children feel – if they don’t feel them, they won’t learn how to regulate them.
John Gottman has pioneered research on helping children regulate emotions and what we often now call ‘Emotion Coaching’. Emotion Coaching is an evidence-based approach to helping children learn emotional regulation and self-control.
If we avoid emotions…
Sometimes as adults we can want to fix situations fast or make children feel better as quickly as possible. It may feel to us as though things have ‘gone wrong’ if children show heightened negative emotions. This can lead us to ‘explaining’ to children why they should not feel that way or trying to eliminate all ‘triggers’ for behaviour.
We might hear adults say things like
‘It’s okay, we can get a new one’ or
‘You can do this. You’re really clever’
On the face of it these statements might not appear problematic. The intention is to make the child feel better. However, it is unlikely to help the child better regulate emotions on future occasions.
How to teach kids to regulate their emotions
Dealing with emotions in the Moment
If children display dysregulated emotions this lets us know that they do not yet know how to deal with them effectively. We can take this as an opportunity to coach children through their emotions ‘in the moment’.
Modelling Calm
For the child to learn to regulate emotions it is helpful to model this ourselves. When we see a child showing dysregulated emotion we can show empathy for what they feel, while remaining regulated ourselves – We do not need to join in with the escalation. This can be easier said than done and we have all ‘joined in’ at some point. Try to remember that humans pick up on the emotions of other humans. We all have nerve cells in our brains called ‘mirror neurons’ that fire in sympathy when we see an emotion in another person. It is better that the child’s mirror neurons pick up on a bit of our calm, than the other way around.
Joining the ‘thinking’ with the ‘feeling’
When we coach children to regulate emotions, we need to start with acknowledging what the child is already feeling. This is not the same as agreeing that they should be feeling that way. Even if we think the emotion is not warranted, our job is to help the child learn to regulate the feelings they have. We can then offer reassurance, and finally go on to give a more ‘grown up’ or ‘thinking’ interpretation.
It can work like this:
Feeling: ‘You’re feeling a bit worried that the work is too hard
Reassurance: That’s okay. People can feel worried when things seem hard.
Thinking: We can still manage to have a go anyway. It’s fine to try things even when they’re hard’.
Here are two more examples of emotion coaching statements that contain all three sections: feeling, reassurance, thinking:
‘You look pretty upset that your tower got knocked down. That’s understandable. And… we always still have to keep our hands to ourselves, even when we’re cross’
‘You’re frustrated that you didn’t get to finish. It is frustrating. It’s a big job to learn to manage frustration, but you can do it’.
Self-talk on the outside
We can think about emotion coaching as being like ‘self-talk’ on the outside. We are verbalising the sorts of things that we would like children to be saying inside their own heads. We know that young children learn a lot by copying and repeating things they hear around them, so it makes sense for us to give them some good quality self-talk to copy.
Forming New Habits
We should bear in mind that using emotion coaching once or twice is not going to be enough. It takes many exposures, sometimes hundreds, even thousands for new self-talk and new learning to be solidified. The child has to literally form new neural circuits in the brain for this to become second nature… and this takes time. Remember that you are coaching, not giving a one off lesson. Similar to how children hone their handwriting as a consequence of lots and lots of practice, the same will be true for regulating their emotions.