Self-Reg for young children
The self-regulation method makes it possible to break the child's cycle of 'arousal' and teach them to manage stress independently.
Supporting self-regulation is not only about behaviour in the moment. Over time, responsive guidance can help a child develop ways to manage stress, understand emotions, build a stable sense of self and cope with challenges.
Self-Reg is more than a set of individual strategies that sometimes work and sometimes do not, and which become outdated as a child grows. It is a holistic approach to the child based on closeness, understanding, maintaining a good connection, love and acceptance.
Young children learn from adults how to control their emotions and behaviour. Parents help them learn methods of self-regulation by distracting them from what is unpleasant or helping them understand events that are new to them.
When investigating the causes of a child's difficulties, their responses to and processing of different kinds of sensory information may form one part of a broader assessment.
There are various play-based techniques for effectively reaching the sources of attention; above all, however, work should focus on the child’s self-regulation.
The source says that early emotion-regulation behaviours in infancy may include orienting towards pleasant stimuli and turning away from unpleasant ones.
By around three months, babies may use behaviours such as sucking to help regulate themselves. The source interprets facial actions such as frowning or pressing the lips together as attempts to manage expressions of distress.
Between three and six months, babies may engage in distraction and seek help as ways of regulating their emotions. By one year of age, babies begin to recognise their parents' ability to provide regulatory support. Babies generally find fear difficult to regulate, for example, and often express it in ways that attract attention.
By the end of the first year, young children begin to adopt new strategies for reducing negative arousal. These strategies may include rocking, chewing objects or moving away from things that upset them.
After the age of two, children increasingly begin to use simple strategies to influence their emotional state. Developing language, motor and cognitive skills can gradually help them manage emotional reactions and arousal more effectively, while they still rely heavily on adult co-regulation.
Young children's behaviours that may cause frustration and feelings of helplessness:
- Many children, especially young ones, find it very difficult to 'observe, evaluate and modify' their own emotions; they act impulsively under the influence of those emotions
- Appealing to ‘left-hemisphere processes’, such as speech and executive functions, is ineffective when regulating a child’s emotions because, in a state of excessive arousal, these processes ‘switch off’ in children under the influence of adrenaline; it is therefore pointless to talk to children because they will not ‘hear us’.
- The stronger the effect of adrenaline on a child, the less able they are to ‘observe, assess and modify’ their own emotions. It is difficult for the child to control their ‘reptilian brain’ and connect with their carer.
- Young children experience intense emotional reactions that can be sudden and seem catastrophic, following an ‘all or nothing’ pattern.
- Sometimes a child is so upset or angry that nothing you say or do seems to help. This is not because the child is refusing to try or is ‘naughty’, nor because a literal ‘braking mechanism’ has failed. When highly aroused, a child may temporarily struggle to take in and process what an adult is saying or doing.
The most important thing is for the parents of a young child to calm themselves first and then try to settle the child before discussing matters related to emotions. It is the same rule as on an aeroplane: put on your own mask first and then the child's, because if you lose consciousness, you will not be able to help the child... Remember this.
The source attributes a child's distractibility, impulsivity, difficulty listening, low tolerance of frustration and other challenging behaviours to overstimulation.
When a child is highly stressed, it may be harder for them to attend to what they see and feel or anticipate what will happen next. That uncertainty can add to distress and further reduce attention.
The source describes withdrawal and intense focus on one thing as ways of shutting out stress.
Using a Self-Regulation Perspective
The source links distractibility, impulsive behaviour, difficulty listening, low frustration tolerance and other challenging behaviour with excessive arousal or ‘overstimulation’. It suggests that greater stress can make it harder for a child to engage with what they see and feel or anticipate what will happen, which may in turn increase stress and inattention.
Withdrawing and focusing excessively on something are ways of blocking out stress. The better a child learns to identify and reduce the stressors that make them inattentive, the easier it will be for them to recognise patterns in what had previously been an 'overwhelming, noisy chaos'.
Children cannot be forced to calm down on command. Threatening punishment when they cannot do so may add to the stress they are already experiencing.
Emilia Adamczyk