Giving Your Child the Gift of Self-Regulation

By Maude Le Roux, OTR/L, SIPT, RCTC, DIR® Expert Trainer at A Total Approach

For many children, self-regulation is a daily struggle. Self-regulation is the ability to understand your own behavior and modify it while reacting to the world around you. It’s about effectively managing your emotions in a wide variety of situations – and it doesn’t come easily to everyone.

Imagine being a child who has challenges with self-regulation. Things constantly pop up to provoke your emotions. Yet teachers ask you to be quiet. People tell you to calm down. Friends shy away when you’re feeling distressed.

How frustrating this must be! It’s no wonder that these children often go into meltdown mode when loving parents are only trying to help. If this sounds like the situation for you and your child, I’d like to share some tips for helping them self-regulate more effectively. 

Moderate Your Voice

As a parent, you can support your child’s self-regulation by staying calm and thinking carefully about how you speak. Avoid raising your voice, use a neutral tone, and speak to them in short, simple phrases when you can see they’re struggling with their emotions. 

Establish a Safe Space

Create a safe spot at home where your child can retreat during difficult times. Calmly encourage them to seek out this spot when they feel too overwhelmed to regulate their emotions. 

For more information about establishing a safe spot, I invite you to take the Golden Nuggets parent course from The Maude Le Roux Academy. It explains this concept in much more detail.

Raise Sensory Awareness

In order to self-regulate, your child needs more awareness about what’s happening within themselves. Allow your child to experience their emotions and begin to discover an awareness of how the process of self-regulation feels. 

Be advised that their emotions may become more even intense at first, rising to a crescendo before they can begin to self-regulate. This is normal. The goal is to give your child a “felt” sense of internal control, where they can see how it feels within their body to self-regulate. Over time, they will gain an understanding of this new sensation and will be able to recognize it as it happens.

Allow Time for Self-Discovery

Instead of trying to tell your child how to self-regulate, provide them with the opportunity to accomplish it for themselves. Don’t tell them how to feel. Give them the chance to feel what they will feel, then to find their own path to self-regulation.

This is a valuable opportunity for them to discover a new sense of personal power. Allow your child the time and space it takes to accomplish this their own way, and you will both be rewarded with an improvement in self-regulation.

Tell Them You’re Proud of Them

When your child is completely calm, share a big hug and tell them you’re proud of them for handling their own emotions. Move on and continue whichever daily tasks you were accomplishing when they had a moment of difficulty with self-regulation.

I’d also encourage you to reflect on the day with them later, during a quiet moment when you can discuss the day’s events. Bring up the moment that caused a crisis of emotion for them. It’s okay to tell them you were concerned about their reaction at first, but then you were so proud of them for regulating their own emotions.

Learn More About Self-Regulation

If you’d like to learn more about helping your child self-regulate, I recommend contacting A Total Approach. They have therapists who are trained in my methodology and share the self-regulation techniques that give your child a sense of empowerment.