What is Emotional Regulation?
Emotions are important. They help us organise our inner worlds and guide us as to what we focus on and how we respond to the world around us. The relationship we have with our emotions and how we regulate the impact of emotion is known as emotional regulation or self-regulation. We can think of this as the system we use to appropriately deal with stress and then recover.
Why is emotional self-regulation so important for healthy functioning and early intervention?
Without the ability to regulate emotion, or having an impaired ability to regulate emotion, a child or young person quickly becomes unable to cope with the stress and emotions they are experiencing. It is this process of calibrating emotional responses with recovery that is at the foundation of healthy emotional regulation. To put it another way we need to learn to how to manage our emotions through a process of challenges and recovery. We call this ability to respond and recover to stress .
What can teachers do to improve and support emotional self-regulation of the young people they support?
A highly stressed young person may not be interpreting what is going on accurately. Talking about emotions in a safe, inclusive environment helps a young person identify and understand what their emotions are.
We have developed two videos to help teachers facilitate conversations around emotions. You can use the first video with your class or groups of pupils. The second video will talk you through how to use the first and give you some ideas on how to facilitate discussions around emotions. We also have some emotion based exercises in our resource section.
3 top tips!
- Modelling appropriate behaviour is important during the childhood years.
- Learning to self-regulate is essential in a child’s development.
- Early years educators are in a unique position to have a major beneficial influence on children’s development.
