If you often see your kids burst into a tantrum or have an emotional melt-down at an age when many other kids can control their emotions, your child may be having difficulty with emotional self-regulation.
In other words, they act on impulse and struggle with inappropriate behavior because their emotions are often uncontrolled.
How to Help Your Kid with Self-Regulation?
Self-regulation is important in developing a balanced personality and not letting your behavior be controlled by impulsive emotions.
Simply put, it is the ability of being able to manage one’s emotions and behaving in accordance with the situation instead of having highly emotional reactions.
Emotional dysregulation is something many kids struggle with.
Some display a strong emotional reaction that’s instant and without build-up, often startling those around them. While others may let distress build-up in their system until it gets unmanageable, leading to a behavioral outburst. Kids with both kinds of emotional dysregulation issues will benefit by learning how to better control their emotions and express themselves in a more effective and less disruptive way.
Here are some exercises that you can practice with your child to assist with developing the skill of self-regulation:
- If your child behaves impulsively in shopping malls and responds with a huge outburst if you try stopping him/her, help them practice self-regulation by taking them to a mall when you don’t have some serious shopping to do and ask them to walk by your side without touching anything. If they’re able to do so, give them praise to encourage more of this behavior.
- Try scaffolding proper behavior by helping them manage a challenging situation instead of handling the situation yourself. Such as, if your child has a meltdown when they’re unable to solve a math problem, help them with one question and let them do others on their own, checking periodically only to see the progress and appreciate their work.
- If there’s something that your child finds difficult to do, such as brushing their teeth, divide the activity into smaller manageable steps and encourage your child to handle it by teaching one step at a time for success. For instance, start with asking them to put toothpaste on the brush only. Once they practice this, give them more independence to handle the next steps. Starting this when your child is young will help everyone.
Lastly, always remember that learning and practicing self-regulation takes time. Your child will slowly learn things. Meanwhile encourage them, provide non-judgmental feedback, and help them to be more self-reflective. This process of modeling appropriate and effective strategies takes time and patience and is well worth the effort. Your child will benefit tremendously through the development of improved self-regulation and sufficiency.