Today’s blog post was written by Alexandra Eidens from Big Life Journal.
Emotional regulation is a foundation for living a balanced life. Emotional regulation fosters resiliency. Children with this skill do not let failures get them down. Instead, they look forward to the next try. Here are seven steps to improve your child’s emotional regulation skills.
Model positive emotional regulation skills
Parental modelling is vital for teaching emotional regulation. Children who observe their parents’ every move, internalizing, and then mimicking their behaviours have a practice ground for perfecting regulation.
A parents’ ability to practice self-regulation is one of the first emotions-related modelling children see. Children learn appropriate reactions to difficult situations. Children who watch how their parents control their emotions learn how to deal with intense feelings and impulses.
The counterpart is how parents who struggle with emotional regulation are more likely to have children suffer from emotional dysregulation.
Foster a positive emotional climate at home
Families live within systems. There’s an expanse of an environment surrounding children with the family system being essential for emotional regulation. Creating a balanced home requires all members to identify and express emotions safely and productively.
As children are learning these skills, the best home environments include caregivers who are modelling these behaviours. Talk yourself through difficult situations so children can see emotional regulation in action. Use a burned dinner as a teaching moment to show children how to cope with failure. Show children how you can feel mad, sad, annoyed, and control how to express emotions.
Use props and supports fostering emotional regulation like a chill box. Fill a container with activities and cues for calming. It can include sensory blankets or tactile pillows, playdough and putties, bubbles, stress balls, or squishy toys. When children are upset and can’t find the right emotions, redirecting them to these calming activities helps them get to a state where they can better communicate.
Teach them how to detect stress
Part of emotional regulation requires children to feel their emotions. Help ask children questions when they have big emotions that will help them identify these feelings in the future.
Have them place their hands over their heart and feel their heartbeat. Help them feel the difference between fast beating and slower beating. Have them feel their face. Children who are angry or scared may have hot, red faces. It helps them feel the temperature difference and see the difference in a mirror.
You want children to acquire emotional regulation skills they will be able to use away from home. After examining physical responses to emotions, teach them ways to alleviate them safely. Coping skills like deep breathing, counting, visualization, and movement are helpful and readily available. Work with school staff to provide wrap-around support, so your child’s safe environment extends to school.
Teach them self-regulating techniques
Children learn through modelling, so show them your coping skills for regulating emotions. Have them partake in your morning yoga routine as you explain how it balances out your feelings to start your day off right.
Use a stress ball and talk about how the squeezing movements help release energy that can build when anxious or angry. Ask them for their play dough or putty and explain how their play does the same thing.
Writing journals for kids can also come in handy for understanding the mind and body connection by taking an abstract idea and providing a concrete model.
When traffic stands still when you are three blocks from school and a minute from the late bell, breathe, talk through your breathing exercise for a lesson in patience. “I’m feeling anxious about getting to school late, so I’m going to take some deep breaths to calm myself.”
Improve your child’s emotional vocabulary
Self-expression is an essential part of emotional regulation. Children need to be able to tell caregivers what they are feeling. Feelings of frustration, anxiety, and fear can all present as anger. Children who can identify the emotion help caregivers problem-solve to alleviate the trigger.
An emotion chart is a practical aid for helping children learn the names of emotions and their looks. Simple emojis or hand-drawn faces include furrowed brows, smiling faces, and raised eyebrows to indicate some things for which to look. Keep a mirror around the chart so children can practice making the faces of various emotions.
A useful strategy is to create a chart with all the emotions named in it, with examples or face illustrations of how the particular passion makes us feel. Calling the feelings they are experiencing makes a child more vigilant and aware of his innermost feelings and reduces emotional bursts.
Encourage them to delay their response
Encourage children to step away. Children who can take time to calm themselves are better able to express themselves to caregivers. Parents who have ever dealt with an inconsolable child know how long it takes to understand what’s wrong. Between the gulping, sniffling, and screaming, parents have to find what triggered the response. A child who has learned deep breathing techniques and other efficient coping skills takes less time to calm themselves, making a more manageable solution.
Introduce and practice mindfulness
The connection between mind and body is an important concept to teach children. The idea of what the mind does is abstract, but seeing muscles in their bodies moves is concrete. Because of this, children benefit from learning how their hands become fists when angry. Show the idea of anger by demonstrating tense muscles and then releasing muscle tension. Teaching children mindfulness allows them to perform body scans searching for stress.
Teach children essential body scans they can perform before bedtime, in the morning, and throughout the day. Body scans help children start at the toes and slowly check the entire body up to the head. When children find tension in an area, they take time to release it.
Model breathing techniques with the scans to help children learn how they can control a rapid heartbeat. Assisting children to learn to activate their parasympathetic system (the system that calms us down) gives them power and independence during challenging moments. Once activated, the essential frontal cortex guides rational thinking because of being reawoken during stressful moments.
Final Thoughts
Improving your child’s emotional regulation skills not only fosters self-control, but it also builds independence. Children who can navigate difficult situations can also problem-solve more quickly to alleviate the triggers and even avoid dangerous situations. Teaching emotional regulation also helps children tap into their intuition to read cues important to safety and security.
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