Helping Children to Manage Emotions
This year is one of the most unusual of our lifetime. We are all bound to be feeling a range of emotions, regardless of age.
In the previous post we discussed how it is natural for children to experience feelings of boredom. With regards to difficult emotions, be it boredom, frustration, sadness or even anger… how do we respond?
Teaching Emotional Regulation and Self-Control
As children learn to regulate their emotions, connections form between the ‘thinking’ parts of their brain and the ‘feeling’ parts. This can only really happen if children actually get to practice dealing with real emotions. For this reason, we do not need to 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, often referred to as ‘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. We may find ourselves explaining to children why they do not need to 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.
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 our children 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. 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 can start with acknowledging their feelings. 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 those feelings. 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 statements that join thinking with feeling:
‘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 your game on the Play Station. That’s understandable. It’s also important that we work together to get dinner ready’.
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
Using emotion coaching once or twice is not going to be enough. It takes many exposures; hundreds, even thousands for new self-talk to solidify. The child has to 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. It takes time for a new brain pathway to form.
