Teaching Your Child to Self-Regulate
Does your child have difficulty staying on task or remembering to complete their chores? Maybe your child struggles with managing their emotions when they become frustrated or stressed. Teaching your child self-regulation strategies can help them complete tasks and learn how to manage their emotional reactions. Self-regulation is a proactive, self-directed process for attaining goals, learning skills, managing emotional reactions, and accomplishing tasks. For younger children, we explain that self-regulation is a step-by-step process that will help them make progress and meet goals.
Children with strong self-regulation:
- experience greater academic success,
- are better at coping with strong emotions, and
- know how to resist distractions.
Learning self-regulation from an early age and reinforcing it with practice will help your child improve their ability to focus, and have stronger relationships with family and friends.
Self-regulation is a process with four action steps. The four steps are: make a plan, monitor your plan, adjust as needed, and reflect on what worked. Teaching children to apply these steps will help them become more proactive. In this module, we will focus on strategies that will help your child address the first step in the self-regulation process, make a plan. You will learn how to support your child in thinking about choices and making detailed plans.
Watch this 2-minute video to learn more about what it means to have strong self-regulation and why it is important to support children in developing it.
After watching the video, use these discussion questions to help your child understand more about self-regulation:
- What is something you have learned to do that was very challenging?
- When you learned it, did you make a plan, check your progress or try different actions to keep going?
- What is something you need to learn or want to do now that you can use self-regulation to help you with?
