082: Regulating emotions: What, When, & How

Hello 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, particularly the expression of emotions in socially acceptable ways; - Monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions, especially how intense they are and when they occur, to accomplish one’s goal (as such, impulse control is a component of emotion regulation); - At school, children are considered to be self-regulated to the degree that they are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process, although we should note that children of school age are now being required to spend many hours a day learning things that they did not choose and may not be interested in, so to me there’s a big difference in regulating emotions in self-chosen situations and those in which the child MUST participate; - When referring to the parent’s emotion regulation, one set of researchers says ER refers to the parent’s capacity to influence the experience and expression of their emotions in caregiving contexts. In spite of the lack of consensus in definition, most conceptions of ER include concepts related to the successful management and modulation of emotional experiences across time and situations to accomplish a specific goal. One of the most respected authors on this topic, Dr. Claire Kopp at the University of California Los Angeles, notes that “success in self-regulation is frequently indexed by how closely the child meets family and social conventions, including a match to expected emotions. Complying with mother's request to wait for a snack until she finishes a telephone conversation is an acceptable form of self-regulation, but wailing bitterly during the waiting period is not. The young child has to learn expectations for appropriate behavior in specified situations (e.g., putting toys away after playing with them) and the arousal level (emotion) that conventionally goes along with standards for conduct (e.g., putting toys away with positive, neutral, or minimally distressed emotional feelings and expressions).” As with so many of the things we discuss on the show, emotion regulation is very much a culturally specific idea. Our old friend Dr. David Lancy reports on a study of the !Kung people in the Kalahari desert which states that “adults are completely tolerant of a child’s temper tantrums and of aggression directed by a child at an adult. I have seen a seven-year-old crying and furious, hurling sticks, nutshells, and eventually burning embers at her mother…the mother put up her arm occasionally to ward off the thrown objects but carried on her conversation nonchalantly” – I’m picturing the American mother that Dr. Kopp describes trying to carry on her phone conversation under these conditions! And while we’re talking about culture, I did want to mention that there actually is quite a bit of research on cultural issues related to emotion regulation, although the vast majority of the literature on how emotion regulation develops is on the typical sample of White Americans with tiny proportions of people from other cultures who happen to be included, and the results are then extrapolated to all children everywhere. Then there’s a separate line of work on why African American children have deficits in emotion regulation which they do if you’re looking at a school environment that was designed for the success of middle class White children, and whose parents and preschools have been preparing them for this environment since they were born. Most of this line of research discusses these deficits among African American children, although one study said that African American parents may anticipate the more severe negative consequences their children will face for openly expressing their negative emotions compared with White children and will use socialization practices that discourage their children from expressing negative emotions. As White parents we, of course, might never have considered that African American parents need to do this, and that they are doing it so we won’t be scared of their children and call the police. So I’m just going to leave that right there, and recommend that you listen to the episodes I have coming up on White privilege over the coming months if you’d like to learn more about this. I also want to briefly acknowledge the relationship between Emotion Regulation and Executive Function, although I have to say that the literature on exactly how these are connected is extremely confusing. Executive Function is the part of the brain that controls certain aspects of information processing, and since emotions are essentially responses to information (or stimuli) we tend to use executive functions as we regulate our emotions. We really don’t understand well the mechanisms by which emotion is controlled at the level of this information processing, but we do know that when our emotions are so intense that we become dysregulated, our executive function systems won’t work properly. As we discussed in the recent episode on Self-Reg, this is why it’s critical that students feel physically and emotionally safe at school: if they feel unsafe then their emotion regulation skills are engaged in the deep emotional center of the brain, and it is physically impossible to learn new facts or take a test. Why is ER important? ER is important for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that ER is a critical predictor of school success. We can debate the appropriateness of asking 4-6-year-olds (depending on the country in which you live) to sit still, ignore the next child over who is poking them with a pencil, and focus on answering the teacher’s questions – but the reality is that if your child is going to attend school, they’re going to need to do this. The research says: - Maladaptive behaviors become more firmly entrenched from the preschool period onward; - For children whose disruptive behaviors remain relatively high and stable during the preschool years, their behavior begins to impact other areas of child functioning like early school success (through an inability to use higher order cognitive processes like working memory, attention, and planning, and also through negatively affecting the quality of the student-teacher relationship) and peer relations; - Difficulties with ER may also be precursors for later mental health problems, antisocial behavior, and problems with substance abuse and other risk-taking behaviors during adolescence; - Children who have deficits in behavioral control are likely to have co-occurring academic difficulties. What are “normal” levels of ER at various ages? It’s pretty difficult to state what is “normal” for a given child because there is a great deal of interaction between the child’s genetic/biological capabilities and interactions with parents. There is a great deal of evidence in the literature that a successful attachment relationship often precedes successful ER. This is not to say that children who don’t have a secure attachment relationship cannot regulate their emotions, but since the child learns a great deal about ER from the parent, a secure attachment facilitates learning about ER. Researchers assess the security of attachment by looking for: - Separation distress with peak onset commonly seen around 9 months; - Different patterns of greeting the attached caregiver compared to other caregivers around the same period; - “Secure base” behavior: confidently exploring when the caregiver is nearby and attentive, and retreating to the caregiver when threatened; - “Affective sharing”: Routine, automatic sharing of pleasurable discoveries with the caregiver, likely including joint visual attention (pointing to draw attention) in Western cultures; - Through the child’s behavior in the Strange Situation procedure, although this is harder to assess outside the lab environment. Assuming a secure attachment relationship exists, the child is likely to pass through several stages at times that are moderated by the child’s genetics/biology and their relationship with the attached caregiver: - As an infant, innate physiological mechanisms prevent the infant from over-stimulation or arousal – this is why infants turn away from too much stimulation, and self-soothe by sucking. The child’s temperament affects how they respond to stimuli (through individual differences in the time it takes to respond to a stimulus and in the level of response), and can in turn impact how the caregiver responds (a parent may respond differently to an easily frustrated infant to one that is not easily frustrated, which could in turn change the child’s behaviors since the child relies on the parent to regulate the child’s emotions); - Between 9-12 months, babies become capable of goal-directed action, and can begin to comply with commands. Active guidance from caregivers begins to be relevant in the development of precursors to self-control, and coincidentally the research shows that parents’ expectations of children’s behavior shifts at this age as well. I had sort of intuited this and it’s a big reason why when I tell parents about the show I say that it’s relevant to parents of children who are moving by themselves, because it’s the age at which parents have to begin saying ‘no’ rather than just keeping dangerous things out of arm’s reach. As the child starts moving around, 69% of parents say the expect their child to stop, listen, and obey when they say ‘no.’ - The capacity for control of attention begins to emerge toward the end of the child’s first year and continues developing throughout the preschool and school years (choosing what to pay attention to is a key component of ER); - By the end of the second year, toddlers show “deviation anxiety” when they commit or are about to commit a forbidden behavior, often involving spontaneous self-corrections mediated by language (e.g. saying “No, can’t” and getting back down from a place they were told not to be). At this age, standards are primarily driven by the child hearing the caregiver prohibit an activity (or state desired behavior); the child finds it very difficult to hold a prohibition in their mind for longer than a few minutes. It is thus simply not realistic to prohibit a behavior (even repeatedly) and expect that the child refrain from that behavior on an ongoing basis especially when it is emotionally charged (it’s something the child really wants to do, or feels compelled to do), or when the child is stressed or fatigued. It’s the adult’s job to set and maintain the standards for behavior, anticipate difficult or frustrating situations, and help a child who is losing control – while delicately also continuing to allow them to be as self-directed as possible. - By the end of the third year, typically developing children can sometimes employ impulse control and the ability to switch between thinking about two different things to achieve their goals in new situations. They are also shifting from being more interested in the process of reaching a goal (they start painting a dinosaur and then call it a house if it ends up looking like a house), while preschoolers want to reach specific goals, which requires focused motivation. Their ability to recall an internalized representation of what appropriate behavior looks like is developing, and they are motivated to meet or exceed that standard (even if they aren’t always successful); high levels of adult direction reduce children’s motivation to succeed with tasks on their own; - “Effortful control” develops such that by age 4 or 5 children can successfully use a rule to inhibit a dominant response. These same children are described by their parents as more skilled at focusing and shifting attention, less impulsive, and less prone to frustration. Effortful control means that a child can do something that induces distress or discomfort to obtain a desired goal (e.g. approach a dog of which they are slightly afraid because the dog has a fluffy coat they want to pet), and allows children to overcome their desire to engage in a particular behavior and behave according to certain rules or expectations; - Executive Function emerges at some point in the late preschool or early school years, and is defined as involving the ability to make plans, control behavior, reflect on what strategies were successful and which weren’t, and an increase in independence. When the child doesn’t know how they achieved success at something they may attribute the success to powerful others or to chance; they may also develop patterns of ‘learned helplessness’ when they believe they have little control over the events that affect them. The child learns when it is necessary and appropriate to regulate their displays of emotions (e.g. ‘we are in a restaurant now and Mama will get mad if I have a tantrum so I’d better whine to let her know I want ice cream”). One study found that about half of the children with behavior problems in preschool, especially boys, continued to have problems at school age whereas half of them showed improvement. So there’s a 50-50 chance that if your child is struggling with emotion regulation at age 4 or 5 that things will get better in a couple of years, but there’s also an even chance that they won’t unless you do something differently to support your child. Researchers hypothesize that parenting interventions to help improve children’s executive function are likely to be most effective earlier, rather than later in children’s development. - The infant’s brain has far more connections between neurons than it needs and it is the child’s experience that determines which connections are retained and which ones die off, or are ‘pruned.’ Infants who were once very flexible in terms of how they responded to stimuli become less flexible over time, and this flexibility is traded for efficiency. What the child becomes efficient at doing depends on the interactions between their environment, which is you, and their brains. The frontal and prefrontal lobes of the brain, which support activities like deciding what to pay attention to, making decisions, and planning, take longer to develop than other brain functions. The brain has its highest level of neuronal connections between the ages of 12-24 months and around age 7, at which time...