Emotional Regulation Tools
As parents and caregivers, we often focus on teaching our children academic and physical skills, but we may overlook the importance of teaching them emotional regulation. Emotional regulation is the ability to manage and control one’s emotions in a healthy and appropriate manner. It is a crucial skill for children to learn as it can impact their overall emotional development and well-being. In this article, we will discuss the importance of teaching children emotional regulation and provide some tips on how to do so effectively.
What is Emotional Development in Children?
Emotional development refers to the ability to recognize, express, and manage feelings at different stages of life and to have empathy for the feelings of others. For children, it involves learning what feelings and emotions are, understanding how and why they happen, recognizing one’s own feelings and those of others, and developing effective ways of managing them.
Expected Milestones in Emotional Development
Here are some general milestones that children may reach during their emotional development:
Infancy (0-2 years): Babies start to develop a social smile around 2 months of age and begin to laugh aloud around 4-5 months. They can show joy, anger, sadness, and fear in response to different stimuli and situations.
Toddlerhood (2-3 years): Toddlers start to recognize and identify their own emotions and those of others. They begin to develop empathy and can show concern for others.
Preschool (3-5 years): Preschoolers start to understand the concept of rules and can express a wide range of emotions. They can also begin to manage their emotions better, often through play.
School Age (6-12 years): School-age children have a better understanding of complex emotions like pride, shame, guilt, and embarrassment. They can understand that people can have mixed feelings about a situation.
Adolescence (13-18 years): Adolescents can understand that feelings can be conflicting and can change over time. They can also understand long-term and abstract feelings like moral guilt.
3 Ways to Teach Your Kid Emotional Regulation
Learn 3 simple and clear steps to teaching kids how to emotionally regulate. Does your kid struggle with big emotions, having them often, getting stuck in them or having kind of behaviors and reactions to what you suspect are emotions? But they are not acknowledging or dealing with but you are seeing the behavior as a response?If so, what you are seeing is that they have a need to develop a skill called emotional regulation. Honestly this is something that we all have to work on, something that I am working on as an adult because I didn’t have all of the skill development as a child. And I think most of us can see some of that in ourselves as adults and we want to help our kids develop the resiliency of being able to deal with and cope with the difficult emotions that are surely to come. That we are going to deal with on a daily basis, and of course our kids that have difficulties with sensory processing have sensory issues and are so much more likely to have emotional regulation difficulties which is an executive functioning skill.So those three things are:
Sharing my calm
Naming the feeling
Using sensory strategies
And there are many of them to help calm the nervous system down. These are three key ways that you can build the skill of emotional regulation in your child.You will use it over and over again, and yes of course there are more things we can build on. If you would like to hear more about other emotional regulation strategies you can use when your child is dealing with and struggling with these big feelings please download the free PDF by clicking on the button below.I am so happy that you are here because together I believe we can raise a generation that knows how to respond to and accept and move through the many emotions that life brings their way.
