How to Help Your Child Learn Self-Regulation

How to Help Your Child Learn Self-Regulation

What is Self-Regulation? 

Self-regulation is being able to control your emotions and remain calm in social situations. Even if the situation is upsetting to you. As parents it’s important that we help our child learn self-regulation skills.

Children have a wide range of emotions because they aren’t sure how to express emotions yet. A lot of children don’t even understand their big emotions yet so it’s our job as parents to help them learn what emotions are, how to express them, and how to recognize them. (Read: How to Reduce Stress as a Stay-at-Home-Mom.)

Why is it Important That Children Learn Self-Regulation? 

When children do not know how to self-regulate their emotions, it can lead to big tantrums and meltdowns. Toddler tantrums are normal, but as a child grows, it’s important to learn how to self-regulate so they can be in a social situation with other people and know how to cope when something doesn’t go their way.

What Happens if a Child Never Learns to Self-Regulate? 

If a child never learns to self-regulate, you will have a child who may express her strong feelings often in a social situation that they cannot control, for example, if they really want to read crowned but their friend is using the red crown, if they don’t know how to accept and self-regulate their feelings during this minor situation and may blow up into something that’s way bigger than what it needs to be.

When a child doesn’t know how to self-regulate their emotions, they will grow up to be adults who do not know how to self-regulate their emotions. We cannot live our lives based on our emotions. As moms, we know this. If we mother out of her emotions, it may lead to reactive parenting, and that is draining for everybody in the family.

Nine Ways to Help Your Child Learn to Self-Regulate 

Show Your Own Self-Regulation 

The first place to start when showing your child had to self regulate is learning how to self regulate your own emotions. If you are reactive parents and your child will feed off of your emotions and they will also become Reactive.

Reactive means that you react to situations based on your emotions. We all know that we cannot do this as adults because some situations call for us to be able to be calm and composed.

Practice With Situations at Home When They Arise 

A great place to start self-regulation is when your child is little and to practice at home when small situations arise.

For example, if your child is really wanting to watch some TV show but their sister has already picked one.

This is a great opportunity to show your child that didn’t get what they want and how to self-regulate and stay calm even when they’re upset.

Give Them an End Goal  

Talk to your child about the angle of self-regulation. It could be the actual end goal, which is to raise children who are able to cope with situations.

You can explain to your older children how some situations might arise where they will need to learn how to stay calm, and you can talk to your child about those situations.

You can also give your younger children a reward or maybe start a sticker chart to help them learn how to self-regulate with motivation.

Provide Ways of Self-Soothing 

Knowing how to self soothe when you’re upset is a very important skill as a child grows. If you need some ideas of how teach your child to self soothe, I have a list here.

Practice With Board Games 

Board games are a great way to practice self-regulation because you have a clear winner and loser in each game. You can teach the winner of your games how to be an acceptable winter.

Not a sore winner, not somebody who brags about winning. And you can teach the loser of the game how to not be a sore loser. And explain that games are exactly just games, and you might win one time, and you might lose the next, and we need to learn how to control our disappointment if we lose and control our ego if we win. 

Give Examples from Books 

Books are an excellent source of life lessons for your children. They may not even realize they are learning anything while you are reading to them.

Find books that have a wonderful example of self-regulation and disappointment that your child can learn from.

Keep Their Weak Spots/Triggers in Mind

If you know your child struggles with a certain area or has a certain trigger when they go out in public, be mindful of those triggers and weak spots.

Try your best to either prepare them if you know it’s inevitable that they’re going to be in a situation that they struggle with or try not to put them in a situation that they struggle with if it’s not necessary.

Teach Your Child to Name Their Feelings 

Being able to recognize and then big feelings is it an important part of self-regulation whether you’re a child or an adult. Just start by teaching your child what emotions they are why they might be feeling the certain emotions and how to name them.

Encourage Your Child 

Encouragement goes a long way and that is especially true for children. When you see your child is doing really good at self-regulation encourage them to continue the progress.

Give them praise and let them know that you were proud of them. If your child is struggling to learn how to self-regulate, then encourage them to continue even though it’s hard. Let them know they can do hard things in that in the end it is worth it.

Self-Regulation Skills Take Practice and Time 

No one knows how to self-regulate overnight. It takes time and takes practice, and it takes relentless intentionality. But self-regulation skills are important skills to have as we grow.

Some children are more prone to emotional meltdown and others and so it might be a little trickier to teach self-regulation with that child continue to put in the work Momma you can do it, and it is worth it. (Read Now: How to Calm Down a Toddler Tantrum.)