Regulating Children

The importance of self-regulation in young children should be a common topic in the world of teaching. The idea of self-regulation is a simple one, “self-regulation is a mechanism enabling to control one’s impulses and, doing something that is needed” (Aras, 2015). Without self-regulation, students can hardly progress to higher levels of understanding. In Selda Aras’ article ‘Promoting Self-Regulations in the Early Years: Tolls of the Mind’ she explains that without the right set of skills students will have difficulty learning in a classroom setting (2015). When a student enters school they are not there just for academic purposes, they are there to learn how to interact socially and emotionally as well. If those topics are not addressed early on in a child’s life “normal” things can become difficult.

Social and emotional development begins by showing affection and becoming attached to parents or carers and becoming what we usually call ‘clingy’. Young children may become distressed when a parent leaves the room or is not in sight. Slightly older children may demand attention and use tantrums to get their own way. They will generally be easily distracted from unwanted behaviour.

There are many ways in which I encourage children to be able to develop their own sense of self. I help guide children in expressing their feelings. Sometimes a child gets frustrated while completing a task. This child then becomes agitated and temperamental, expressing their feelings inappropriately. I make it my duty to help them express their feelings in a suitable way. I lead them away from what is the trigger to the behavior. Then take them to a more calming location in the room, stay with them and talk them through the anger. I ask them what the problem is and ask them to point to what they are feeling on the feeling chart. I try to resolve the issue.

Children learn multiple emotion-regulating strategies, from their own experiences and from the observation of adults. For example, when a toddler seeks comfort she crawls up on to the lap of her caregiver, while Connie covers her eyes with her hands during an unpleasant part of a movie to avoid the emotionally arousing situation (Kostelnik et al. 2015, p.135). Adults can help children learn how to better cope with their emotions in a number of ways. Effective ways of responding to emotions include talking about emotions and using affective reflections. Affective reflections involve recognizing the emotions a child is facing and then using a reflective statement to help identify the child’s emotions (Kostelnik et al. 2015, p.144). For example, a reflective statement could be as simple as: “It’s frustrating to be interrupted” (Kostelnik et al. 2015, p.144). Verbally identifying emotions helps children distinguish their emotions and gives adults the opportunity to show their care and understanding towards the child, which plays an important role in the building of strong adult-child

Emotion regulation involves intrinsic and extrinsic processing of monitoring and modifying emotional reactions in both positive or negative situations (Martins, 2012). In order for individuals to have the ability to regulate emotions, they must beware of their emotions. Although infants are unaware and lack the ability to regulate their emotions, it then becomes the role of a primary carer to nurture the infant, thus acting as a model for regulating emotions. Evidently, infants grow to reflect the ways in which their carers control and modify their emotions as well as social boundaries. Furthermore, emotion regulation is considered an important aspect of an individuals life as it 'can moderate emotions and keep them in a manageable range

Managing feelings and behaviour: children talk about how they and others show feelings, talk about their own and others’ behaviour, and its consequences, and know that some behaviour is unacceptable. They work as part of a group or class, and understand and follow the rules. They adjust their behaviour to different situations, and take changes of routine in their stride.

Children are playing with boys and girls cooperatively, they may also have a best friend. Continuing to develop good control of emotion and still seeking adult approval, teachers and parents.

Anger Management is a practical guide that will help you to stay calm in the face of angry

As a supervisor at the Royalton MAP program, a before and after school child care program offered through the Elementary school, I see multitudes of different kids: kids who interact well with others, with a small group of friends, with one single friend, those who choose not to interact at all, and those who do not know to interact appropriately with others. Managing these different kinds of kids can be very difficult. It requires an understanding from me as to why they play with the students they do, why something might have happened, and how to get to the bottom of it. The students who do not know how to play with others are the most difficult to manage. If an argument occurs between them and another student, they use violent words and physical actions to communicate their emotions because most times they do not know how to express them. A perfect example of this kind of student, was Oliver Clemens at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year.

I found the Anger Management and Emotion Regulation Skills intervention from a book Helping At-Risk Students: A Group Counseling Approach for Grade 6-9 (Waterman & Walker, 2009).

1. Chapter 4 “The First Two Years: The Social World” section “Emotional Development” discusses the significance of variety of early emotions that humans have the experience in their life. The most common and basic forms of emotions that infants present as their age is pain and pleasure. Throughout their life, they develop mentally and physically, as well as learning more emotions that enable them to show expressions, reactions, and reasons that trigger those reactions (Berger, 130) During toddlerhood, between the ages of two and up, emotions are strengthened, for example, toddlers’ laughter and cries are more apparent and amplified. Together with their anger and fear becoming less frequent but directed towards experiences that are terrifying and infuriating. In addition, toddlers often have temper tantrums, “when something angers them, they might yell, scream, cry, hit, and throw themselves on the floor” (Berger, 130) Toddlers’ temper tantrums can even cause more tantrums or worsen the situation if a response from an adult or is negative, like out of anger or teasing the child.

As a parent, it is important to understand a child’s temperament so that an adaptive parenting style can be used. For example, if a child is characterized by a difficult temperament, he or she will be moody and be resistant to new experiences (Shaffer et al., 2010, p.445). For parents, this can be a frustrating situation that results in them becoming “irritable, impatient and punitive” (Shaffer et al., 2010, p.445). Due to the frustration, parents will enforce techniques that negatively impact their child. Therefore, it is important to understand the tendencies and the temperament of a child so that an optimal environment that fosters development can be created. Furthermore, if the temperament of a child is understood an effective punishing and nurturing strategy can be implemented. By doing so, the stresses of parenting can be alleviated as the child will respond positively to the caregiver and the caregiver will not

The social skills lesson plan teaches students the skill of dealing with their own anger, and is intended for students in grades Kindergarten. I chose this social skill because it is an issue I have observed in my current Kindergarten student internship. Also, learning to deal with ones own emotions is a fundamental skill. The lesson begins with a read aloud of the book The Mad Family Gets Their Mads Out by Lynne Namka. The story helps children understand feelings of anger, what steps to take to help regulate angry feelings in a pro social way, and why it’s important to deal with our own anger in a positive way. The read aloud is followed by an activity where students will role-play real life scenarios in the classroom. Students will learn the task analysis for dealing with their own anger and implement as they role-play the scenario. The task analysis involves three steps: (1) pause, (2) step back/take deep breathe, and (3) choose appropriate response. Apprpriate response may be to

When parents and family members repeat the process of saying please and thank you around the house, they learn to know the true meaning of having manners. Children seeing the way others share items and feelings around each other is a big eye opener to them that allows the child to feel their own feelings. When children see that they do something wrong, the parent should always be there to ask them questions for example on what happened?, how this made them feel?, how they think the other person felt when they did the same thing back? Children than begin to think about their own actions might impact the emotions of those around them. When kids interact with one another they get to learn how to relate with eachother that will then help develop social problem-solving skills. Having many practice with peers help them a lot to solve and listen to each other that way they learn to compromise. Although, youngsters who have difficulty showing and or controlling their emotions are more likely to struggle with problems like depression and anger. This gives a child a lower self-esteem and will have a poor self image on themselves due to the fact that everyone around them is either always being negative, any type of bullying, being teased, made fun of, and when they distance themselves from anyone around them. During early childhood, children often start to develop self-conscious emotions around parents,

In the book, “Raising An Emotional Intelligent Child” author John Gottman guide’s parent’s toward raising an intelligent child by teaching them about the awareness of their emotions. Parents are known to be emotional coaches, parents who get involved with their child’s feelings. They accept negative emotions as a fact of life and use emotional moments as opportunities for teaching their kids important life lessons and building closer relationships with them. Emotional intelligence controls impulses, delays gratification, motivate themselves, reading others social cues, coping with life’s ups and downs. Parenting requires intellect, but most importantly empathy. In parent- child interactions, most parents fall into two categories: parents who give their children guidance about the world of emotion and those who do not. There are 3 types of parents who fail to teach emotional intelligence: the dismissing parent, disapproving, and Laissez-Faire. Dismissing parents tend to disregard and ignore children’s negative emotions. Disapproving parents are critical of their children’s displays of negative feelings and may punish them for emotional expression. Lastly, Laissez-Faire parents, accept their children’s emotions and empathize with them, but fail to offer guidance or set limits on their children’s behavior.