We’ve already covered emotion regulation a few times on the show: there were these older short episodes on https://yourparentingmojo.com/youreok/ (Three Reasons Not to Say “You’re OK!”) and https://yourparentingmojo.com/emotionregulation/ (Modeling Emotion Regulation), as well as https://yourparentingmojo.com/selfreg/ (the more recent one) on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s book Self-Reg.
But I realized I’d never done the episode that should underlie all of these, which discusses what actually is emotion regulation and when (for crying out loud!) our children will be able to do it. So we cover that in this episode, as well as some resources to help you support your child in developing this capability, the most important of which is Dr. John Gottman’s book https://amzn.to/2S5mrqR (Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child) [affiliate link].
 
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Read Full TranscriptHello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that’s relevant to all of us at some point, and that’s emotion regulation. We’ve already covered this from a few angles; you might recall episodes on how children learn about emotion regulation through direct teaching and through modeling, as well as the more recent episode on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s book Self-Reg, which discusses the potential impact of environmental stressors on self-regulation. But I realized we’ve never done a background episode on what exactly is emotion regulation, when we can expect to see more of it, and what are some resources we can use to support our child in developing this capability, so we’re going to do that today.
Surprisingly, there is no single definition of what is an emotion. Most emotion theorists describe emotional behavior in terms of a chain of events, e.g.:
Stimulus in context > cognitive process > experienced feeling > behavior
Different theorists give different weight to physiological and cognitive processes, and the exact order in which the steps appear (e.g. whether the emotion includes the cognitive appraisal or follows it). Despite the fact that their brains aren’t as well-developed as ours, children still feel emotions in the same way that we do. Dr. John Gottman, who has studied and written about children’s emotion regulation, says that “we have inherited a tradition of discounting children’s feelings simply because children are smaller, less rational, less experienced, and less powerful than the adults around them.” When adults disregard children’s feelings – for example, when we do things like saying “there’s nothing to be afraid of” when they wake up with a nightmare or don’t want to go into a big loud party, the child begins to believe the adult’s judgement and stops trusting their own judgements about their own feelings. They begin to think “well I feel scared, but my trusted caregiver is telling me there’s nothing to be scared of so I must have mis-judged the situation,” when in fact, even adults can wake up scared from nightmares and can feel some trepidation when walking into a loud, crowded party. And it also turns out that understanding your own emotions and the emotions of those around you is critical to regulating those emotions – which is something we all want for our children!
What is emotion regulation?
Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no single definition of Emotion Regulation (ER) either. Some definitions include:
- Reflecting modulating and changing emotional states, managing emotion, responding and modulating behavioral expression of emotions,...