Emotional Regulation Ideas for Kids and Teens
When you’re looking for child counseling in St. Louis, you’re probably noticing some emotional regulation issues.
Temper tantrums, crying spell, big outbursts - we’ve heard about all of it at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis. And we LOVE to work with it!
One of our favorite interventions to teach parents, and kids and teens, was created by me and is called The Three Step Approach. You can read tons more about it here, and in my book, When Anxiety Makes You Angry. But today, we’re doing a video walk through!
The three step approach and how to use it as a parent.
Transcript:
Hey everyone, I'm Kelsey Torgerson Dunn, the author of When Anxiety Makes You Angry, and the owner and founder of Compassionate Counseling St. Louis.
Today I want to talk with you about setting healthy boundaries for your kids. And, approaching boundaries and setting limits and consequences from a background of acceptance and commitment therapy.
The idea with ACT or acceptance and commitment therapy is that there are no such things. There are no such things as bad thoughts. There are just thoughts and just emotions. And, whatever you're feeling, whatever you're thinking, even if it seems really terrible, it's just noise.
(Read more about ACT here: Stopping Toxic Thoughts, the Big Secret ACT Therapists Want You to Know!)
It's just information. So when you're working as a parent, and you're dealing with the big emotions and the big thoughts that kids can sometimes have, it's really easy to also have your emotions become heightened.
Your kid starts to get angry, and you start to get angry. Your kid is stressed. You start to get stressed. Your kid is anxious and overwhelmed. You start to get anxious and overwhelmed too.
But really, rather than following the idiom that misery loves company, we as parents are in this unique role of getting to be in charge of what's going on. And so we want to be in charge of our emotions. And staying calm and in charge of our emotions allows our child to more easily become calm as well.
Feeling like you could use some extra parent coaching and support?
Check out our Therapeutic Parent Coaching. It’s like therapy for parents and focuses on helping you master the tools you need, so you can help your child navigate their struggles.
I like to encourage parents to use the three-step approach when it comes to identifying and managing overwhelming emotions in their kids and even in their teenagers and even in their college students too. And even with your partners too. I think it works for a lot of different people.
The pre-step as the parent in charge is to make sure that your own body is calm and regulated.
So noticing where is my emotional level at right now. Kind of feeling like my anxiety or stress is a five or six or seven. What can I do to bring it down a little bit? Can I do a big deep breath? Can I let my kid know that I'm going to go take a walk and I'll be back real quick. Let my kid know, hey, I'm feeling kind of anxious and angry, so I need to go cool down and take some time and then I'll come back and we'll deal with this problem.
It is one hundred percent appropriate for you to identify your own emotions as long as you're saying I'm in charge of my emotions, and not saying that it’s your fault I’m feeling this way.
That's a pre-step: make sure that you are feeling calm and ready to handle the challenge.
Step one, identify and empathize.
You want to identify the feeling that your child is experiencing and empathize with that. Feeling whatever it is. It might look something like your kid is complaining about their teacher. Their teacher doesn't understand them. Their teacher doesn't get them. Their teacher is so mean.
You might say something like, it sounds like you're really frustrated with your teacher.
And I can understand that. Like, it sounds like your teacher isn't understanding what you're trying to say and isn't helping you. That would be really frustrating. Or your child might be crying and really tearful and you could say something like, you know, I'm noticing that you seem really sad right now and not getting picked for the soccer team. That would make me feel sad also. I get it.
When you're identifying and empathizing, please allow for error and for correction, even if you don't think that's what's really going on. Your trauma and say, I'm not sad. I'm mad. I can't believe they did. I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm mad. I mean, that makes sense to be mad too. Maybe even to feel sad and mad. At the same time, or maybe your child says, I'm not frustrated at my teacher. I'm just so annoyed and disappointed. I don't know why this keeps happening. Like, yeah, annoyed. Okay. Get that. Disappointed for sure. It would be great if they just were on your side and right now it doesn't seem like they're on your side.
So identify the emotion, empathize with the emotion rather than saying don't feel that way or you shouldn't feel like that. That's going to kind of take the heat out of it.
Step two, calm down
Step two is to calm down before I jump into problem solving. You have to calm down. You want a really big coping skills toolkit and we've got a lot of great resources on our website, on our blog already. Help your child figure out how to solve the problem. Something they can do to calm down. Maybe do it with them or give them the opportunity if they're a teenager to kind of cool down on their own.
As anxiety therapists, we know the tools you need to manage your anxiety.
Our awesome team of amazing, compassionate counselors are eager to help you or your child create a plan to take charge of your anxiety.
Say, hey, before we deal with this, like let's make sure that we're feeling really calm and really regulated. Do you want to like listen to some music? Do you want to do a meditation? Do you want to go on a walk with me? Do you want to just do some deep breaths with little kids? We can be a lot more hands on. Hey, let's do some big deep ballet breaths together. Take a big breath in through your nose. And then out through your mouth. Let's keep doing that until you feel calm and you're ready to talk some more. How can child regulate? And then when you're both regulated, you're both calm, you're both within your window of tolerance. And then you can jump into the game plan. That's the point where you strategize.
Step three, game plan
Instead of trying to solve things right away, you gotta make sure you're calm and regulated so that you can think more clearly. And with game planning, that's when we would bring in logical consequences. Or you would bring in here's how we solve the problem. Here's what I think you should do, what you think you should do.
What about the mean teacher? Well, you know, you have to do some of your homework. Even if they don't really, you don't feel like they understand you. What would be like the baseline that you could do? Or, like, what's the piece of what that we could do today? When you are really upset, you put a lot of toys on the ground. I can help you clean it up, but I think we need to- clean it up and kind of figure out what we can do next time so that this doesn't happen again.
It is 100% okay to say, you need to do this, or, you know, we have this time out that's planned, so we gotta take a break. But then we can come- back and move forward. You want to hopefully allow your child and teacher child how to kind of solve their problems on their own and fill their independence and help guide them, but maybe encourage them to take some ownership of what's going on. And come up with their solutions as well. That's a three-step approach. How we use it with our kids and with their teens. You can read more at the blog and thanks for listening.
Compassionate Counseling St. Louis specializes in anxiety therapy for teens, kids, and college students, along with partnering with parents through parent coaching - basically therapy for parents here in St. Louis. We’re located in Clayton and work with clients throughout the St. Louis region. To schedule a free phone consultation, please use our contact page.
