How Parents Can Help Regulate Their Child’s Emotions
We often assume our children deliberately choose to behave or misbehave. We don’t recognize that many of our children’s behavior is their body’s reaction to stress.
A good amount of a child’s behavior emerges from unintentional, subconscious, and automatic responses to stress. Therefore, these behaviors do not involve conscious thoughts.
The next time your child misbehaves or reacts a certain way, remember their behavior is likely a response to stress rather than a thoughtful intent. A child can develop intentional or planned behavior (what many parents call “manipulation”) after the age of four. It can take many more years to develop fully.
When faced with problematic behavior or a challenging child, ask yourself this question:
What does this behavior tell me about my child?
Our role as parents is to connect, support, and provide a safe environment for our children when they are experiencing a challenging situation or showing behavior that might seem like misbehavior.
Don’t aim to stop what your child is showing or sharing. Instead, let them feel your presence and borrow their emotional regulation from your nervous system. The co-regulation will allow you to provide a safe space so your child can feel heard, protected, and understood by you. As a result, they will feel open to express what is behind the misbehavior.
Our children develop the ability to control their behavior through brain development and active engagement with their parents or caregivers. For a child to self-regulate their emotions, they need emotional co-regulation from their parents.
Don’t judge your child’s behavior as good or bad without understanding the underlying cause of it. However, constant outbursts, meltdowns, and challenging behaviors can indicate a child doesn’t feel safe in their environment and his emotional needs are not being met. Therefore, it is hard for them to regulate or control their body’s responses.
How can your child borrow emotional regulation from your nervous system?
You can't simply ask your child to stop a behavior or to calm down and use their words to communicate what's wrong if they cannot do so or do not have the developmental capacity to regulate their emotions.
This may sound familiar to you, "When you are done crying, you can come to me?" "Stop crying and use your words so I can understand you." Another example is, "I don't understand crying language." When we use this approach to correct a child's misbehavior, we are telling the child to figure things out themself and then come to us when they have fixed/regulated their problem/behavior.
In other words, a child can interpret these expressions as "I am alone in this. I have to be able to control my emotions and bring myself back to normal on my own". "Only if I’m calm will my parents listen to me." Unfortunately, "many of our approaches falsely assume that our children can self-regulate their emotions and behaviors when in reality, they do not yet have that ability to do so unless you have taught them how to do it" (Delahooke, 2020).
The Polyvagal Theory created by Dr. Stephen Porges explains when a child faces constant distraught or persistent behavioral challenges, it indicates the child's nervous system is repeatedly adjusting and responding to stress.
When confronted with a troubling behavior in your child:
Change the question: Instead of, “What’s wrong with you?” ask “How can I help you?” Or “That’s not a reason for you to be crying” to “How can I help you feel better? - What do you need from me right now?”
Safe place: Find a safe place where you and your child can express feelings, and you both can connect during their moment of frustration.
Share your calm: Let your child borrow from your nervous system calmness, security, and protection. Your child will rely on your nervous system to help their bodies and emotions regulate. Most importantly, your energy will be transferred to your child. if you are stressed, anxious, and not at peace they will absorb it. Similarly, if you are calm, present, and regulated, they will borrow from your nervous system to bring themselves back to a calm state.
Reflect: Before you respond to your child’s behavior, try to examine and understand the origin of the behavior and what the child is trying to tell you.
Awareness: Understand your child’s cues and interpret what underlies the behavior.
Motive: Identify if their behavior is intentional or a stress response. Both responses have an underlying emotional need you must address to meet their emotional and physiological needs.
Finally, when a child feels heard, validated, cared for, and overall safe around their parents and caregivers, they will develop a solid emotional and healthy psychological base. This emotional foundation will define their level of maturity, how the child confronts life challenges as he grows older, and how emotionally healthy that child will be as an adult.
Written by Nicauris Ubiera, LAC
About Nicauris:
Nicauris received her Master’s in Mental Health Counseling from Alliance Graduate School of Counseling at Nyack College. She works with children, adolescents and teens, but also works with families and parents providing tools and communication skills to help the parent understand and help their child cope with the difficult stage they might be going through.