Helping your toddler with feelings

Helping your little one manage feelings and behaviour.

Self-regulation for little ones

It's simpler than it sounds. Self-regulation is the overarching term for a group of skills which help us to manage our emotions, thinking and behaviour. It is helping your child to express emotions in a way that is more effective (and less disruptive) than having a full-on meltdown. Or simply to support him or her to take helpful actions and understand feelings better. 

Self-regulation is not about teaching your child (or yourself!) to become a zen robot. It's not about children not having tantrums or getting angry.  Your role is to support your child in handling their feelings and being aware and empowered to make different behaviour choices. There is no perfect recipe - children are wonderfully unique and biologically wired a little differently.

The science stuff

If it seems like your child has a harder time learning self-regulation, and other moms don't report the same struggles, you might think there is something wrong. However, researchers have found that some babies’ temperaments are intrinsically more capable of self-regulating than others.

However, it's not set in stone - all children can learn to manage feelings. Genetics are important, but the environment a child grows up in makes a big difference.

The National Academies of Sciences in the USA published some fascinating research on the neuroscience of delayed self-gratification, one of the behaviours associated with developed skills in self-regulation. In plain speak, they looked at the brain activity of children who were or weren't able to resist temptation at a young age and compared their capacity for decision making at a set point in adulthood. 

Individuals who were less able to delay gratification in preschool consistently showed better self-control abilities in their twenties and thirties.

Is self-control the same as self-regulation?

There is a relationship, but it’s not the same. Postponing immediate gratification and persisting in goal-directed behaviour is part of the ability to self-manage but is more linked to control over one’s actions. There are well known experiments with delayed self-gratification, which is something people have tested as part of the ability to keep one’s emotions and behaviours in check.

Who remembers Walter Mischel’s famous experiment on the child trying to resist the marshmallow? His theory? Individuals who as children voluntarily postpone immediate gratification are better able, as adults, to persist in goal-directed behavior for the sake of later outcomes.

Over time the results have come into question, but it was successful in highlighting how tricky it is to resist temptation - and what the results of this may be.

Cognitive, or self-control, is an important part of growing up. It refers to the ability to suppress competing inappropriate thoughts or actions in favour of appropriate ones. Which really means resisting the temptation to do whatever you want, because you’ve used some decision making to assess whether this will work out better or worse for you in the future. 

Why self-regulation is important 

Self-regulation is important for social, cognitive and behavioural self-control and also healthy self-expression. It's not about squashing the negative and only displaying positive feelings and behaviour. A range of feelings is human, and normal, whatever one's age - but having the tools to navigate them is key.

For a two-year-old this might be a reaction to boundaries when he or she hears 'no' and for a three-year-old it might be suppressing the desire to not share toys because making friends looks more appealing. It is the capacity to decide on next actions/behaviour based on what we feel and what challenges or opportunities life throws at us.

It's about being present during your child's emotional experiences (good or bad), validating their feelings and modelling or showing them options to help them, help themselves. Foundational self-regulation, while often overlooked by parents who may struggle with it themselves, is the key to success in all areas of life, including relationships, school, parenting, and the workplace.

What to do with your child

When a child starts to escalate hysterical / upset feelings, they may seem like they're being 'naughty'. However, it's simply a child whose nervous system is becoming rapidly over-stimulated.

Scolding a child doesn't encourage him or her to develop self-regulation skills and calm themselves.

Different approaches to children's emotions and behaviour have different results.Parents who notice, accept and validate their children’s negative feelings tend to affect them positively. They can then help their children to verbalise feelings and problem-solve for themselves.

• Parents who punish children for their negative emotions can cause them to get even more worked up, which ramps up their nervous system and delays the calming down process.

• This can be extremely hard for parents as it's normal to feel stressed when your child does, particular during a pandemic!

• If I struggle, will I fail my child?

  It’s never too late to start helping children learn to self-regulate. Parents play a major role in self-regulation development, but it’s okay not to have your own self-regulation nailed by the time you have kids! No one has had perfect parenting themselves and some of us have grown up without seeing self-regulation modelled. So what are the key things you can do, regardless of your background?

  How to help your child

  Children observe their parents, internalising and then copying their behaviours. They watch how parents struggle and handle their own intense feelings and impulses. Some ways to support your child are to:

  • 1. Be warm, accepting and responsive to your child’s emotional needs.

  • 2. Talk about emotions.

  • 3.  Support and show empathy to validate your child's negative feelings, even if you don't agree with them internally. Empathy is about showing your child they are heard, and not trying to change their emotions for them.

  • 4. Be patient (harder on some days than others).

  • 5. Don't dismiss, discourage, or punish your child for showing negative feelings.

  • 6. Correcting behaviour by helping to teach new coping techniques is best. (e.g. take a deep breath).

  • 7. Help a very distressed child to redirect attention rather than acting on every emotion.

  • 8. Don't over-protect your child. It is important children feel uncomfortable feelings and develop tools for coping with these. If you're always jumping in and smothering your child with reassurances, they may learn to ‘outsource’ self-regulation - which might become a habit.

Creating calm-down tools for your family

We asked a teacher and mum of two, Claire, to share how she approaches this topic. Claire is a special educational needs teacher and shared her thoughts with us.

"If a child is over-aroused or highly anxious, it prevents them from learning. It blocks the neural pathways so learning cannot take place. For some children this doesn’t come naturally so it needs to be nurtured and sometimes taught explicitly.

We use lots of different ways to support the children in the school I teach at. I created sensory and learning ‘break boxes’ for children who struggled with regulation in my classes. Each box had essential oils (lemon and lavender) to smell, playdough, beads to thread, a stress ball, different tactile pieces of fabric, yoga pose cards, and breathing technique cards with pictures.”

We think this kind of approach is clever and easy. Why? It interrupts a child’s level of heightened emotion (and limbic/survival system) around something by giving them things which stimulate senses that aren’t brain emotion: touch, smell, movement and so on. As a parent, you can create something similar to help your child to redirect their attention and activate sensory experience over immediate emotions which they want to act on!

While you're here

Supporting parents is our mission 😎  And we’re super excited to have launched our new IOS app - it’s ready for you to download! 

Yep, we're on a mission to help you thrive. For us, thriving means parents equipped with the ideas and support needed for daily life with kids. Our app is full of  ideas to help you in meltdown moments or hacks to bring the play back to brushing teeth, getting dressed and more. 

Until the end of June, we’re giving all parents the opportunity to use our app for FREE!