From Chaos to Calm: Emotion Regulation Techniques for Parents and Children

As a professional who primarily supports children, youth, and young adults, I have found a common presenting concern is individuals who struggle to effectively regulate their emotions. My work often focuses on supporting the individual to enhance their capacity to regulate their emotions, supporting and guiding caregivers when navigating emotion regulation challenges, or supporting and enhancing meaningful and healthy conversations around feelings and emotions.

Emotion regulation refers to the way a person manages and responds to their emotional experiences, often referring to adaptive and appropriate ways. It is common for children to need guidance, support, and reminders on how they can effectively and appropriately manage their emotions. My hope is you will be able to take away various thoughts, ideas, and tools to help support your child to navigate tricky and uncomfortable emotions.

Helping children manage their emotions can be easier when parents understand that emotion regulation happens in steps. Thinking of it as a hierarchy — from basic skills like recognizing feelings to more advanced ones like calming down and problem-solving — gives parents a clear roadmap to support their child through emotional difficulties.

1. “Self-Regulation – Self-regulation is when the individual themselves can regulate independently. For example, your child can identify their feeling and regulate it themselves.

2. Ask about Needs – This may require the support of an adult figure who can explore what may be helpful for a child after they have identified the feeling. For instance, your child has identified they are feeling angry. A helpful next step would be to explore with your child, “what do you need in or at this moment?” It is common for children to be unsure what they may need when a certain feeling arises, so it can be helpful to consider the next step.

3. Offer Choice – It is helpful to offer options that give the child the ability to make their own choice if they are unable to identify what they need themselves. This could look like offering choices for strategies or skills to use, where two to three visual options could be helpful to start with. For example, “I see you are angry, would you like your stuffed animal, a fidget toy, or a grounding strategy card?”

4. Verbal and Visual Reminder – Verbal reminders can serve has helpful cues, reminding them of skills and strategies they have found helpful. Visual reminders could be materials such as a feelings’ thermometer, feelings chart, or emotion wheel to help them check-in and identify what is going on for them.

5. Mutual/Co-Regulation – Mutual regulation, also known as co-regulation, is a particularly important piece to support your child in building and enhancing their emotion regulation skills. The first step with co-regulation, is ensuring that you as the support person are calm yourself; your calm energy will support the child with their own regulation. Co-regulation could include encouraging, guiding, and/or supporting your child to engage in strategies and skills to help them regulate their emotions. It is about helping your child manage their emotions, physical responses, and behaviours through a genuine and connected interaction.

Now that you have a better understanding of general pieces around supporting your child through emotion regulation steps, here are more helpful strategies to support with regulating emotions:

✽ Name/Label the Emotion – A common tool I teach is naming or labelling the emotion we may be experiencing which helps us better understand and manage our feelings. I often refer to this as “Name It to Tame It,” a term originally coined by Dr. Dan Siegel. Being able to better understand the emotion or emotions flowing through our body can allow us to tame and face the emotion more appropriately, giving us a sense of control. Tools that could be used here to support your child may be an emotion wheel or a feelings chart; you can ask the child what emotion they may be feeling and help them recognize what’s going on for them.

✽ Validate the Emotion – Validation is a key component in supporting a child through managing their emotions. Validation is a verbal acknowledgment that we have heard and understand what the other person has said, or is feeling, and letting them know you can understand why/ how they might feel like Validating a child’s emotion, may look like, “I see you are feeling overwhelmed, it makes sense that you feel overwhelmed given everything you are dealing with.” Validating one’s emotion can help them feel heard and seen.

✽ Identify Triggers – Triggers are situations or other factors (stimuli) that spark intense emotions within yourself or your child. Understanding what may spark intense emotions within us can be helpful to calm and manage our emotions. Another piece to consider is noticing when you need a break. This often goes together with recognizing triggers; if we can notice our triggers and when we may need to change our space or have time alone, we can manage our emotions more effectively.

✽ Meditation or Mindfulness – Meditation and mindfulness practice allows for the child to reflect and observe their feelings without immediate reaction, which can help manage their emotional responses moving forward.

✽ Talking through Emotions – Being able to talk about our emotions allows a child to have a space to share and unpack what they may be keeping inside of them. Talking about our emotions and feelings is an extremely healthy way to process what is going on for us!

✽ Journaling – Journaling has a therapeutic component to it, allowing the individual to create a safe space to process their experiences. It allows for mental clarity to help gather and organize your thoughts and helps reduce stress by processing emotions. A more kid friendly version of journaling might be sketching in a sketch book and allowing the child to draw and write different words that apply to how they are feeling, or about the drawing.

✽ Sleep – I cannot stress how important sleep is when it comes to our well-being, and in turn our mental-health. It is important to maintain good sleep hygiene and practices to support effective emotion regulation.

✽Consider Therapy – If you are finding your child is stuck in the same patterns or unable to navigate their emotions by using the tips provided here or elsewhere, reach out! Although these tools, skills, and strategies are not for everyone, and it is important to find the right fit for your child!

My hope with this blog is that you were able to gather knowledge and tips about how to navigate regulating emotions, especially if you find yourself in a place where you are supporting a child with managing their emotions.