Taming Your Triggers

• Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them
• Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs
• Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered

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The mother's positive guiding and reinforcing behavior is helpful, but negative behavior is even more impactful. So, unfortunately, it isn't enough to just shower our child with positive behaviors and expect that these will somehow outweigh the negative ones. We also need to work on minimizing the negative behaviors.

Hi, I'm Jen, and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free guide to seven parenting myths that we can safely leave behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. 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 both 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 realize 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 and develop in this capability. So we're going to do that today. I was actually kind of surprised to find that there is no single definition of what is an emotion. Most emotion theorists describe emotional behavior in terms of a chain of events. So for example, there's some kind of stimulus in context, and that leads to a cognitive process, and that leads to an experience feeling, and that leads to behavior. Different theorists give different weight to the physiological and cognitive processes, and the exact order in which the steps appear, for example, whether the emotion includes the cognitive appraisal or follows it, really differs from one theorist to another.

Despite the fact that their brains aren't as well developed as ours, children do 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, quote, we've 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, end quote. When adults disregard children's feelings, for example, when we say things like, there's nothing to be afraid of when they wake up from a nightmare or they don't want to go into a big loud party, the child begins to believe the adult's judgment and stops trusting their own judgment 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 misjudged 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.

Okay, so perhaps not surprisingly, given that there's no single definition of what is an emotion, there's also no single definition of emotion regulation either. So some of the definitions that I found include, firstly, reflecting, modulating, and changing emotional states, managing emotion, responding, and modulating behavioral expression of emotions, particularly the expression of emotions in socially acceptable ways. Secondly, monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions, especially how intense they are and when they occur to accomplish one's goals. As such, impulse control is a component of emotion regulation. Thirdly, at school, children are considered to be self-regulated to the degree that they're 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 learning thing they didn't choose and may not be interested in. So to me, there's a really big difference in regulating emotions in self-chosen situations and those in which the child must participate. And then finally, when referring to the parent's emotional regulation, one set of researchers say that emotion regulation refers to the parent's capacity to influence the experience and expression of their own emotions in caregiving contexts. So in spite of the lack of consensus and definition, most conceptions of emotion regulation 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, quote, success and 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, for example, putting toys away after playing with them, and the arousal level that conventionally goes along with standards for conduct, for example, putting toys away with a positive, neutral, or minimally distressed emotional feelings and expressions, end quote.

And so as with many of the we discuss on the show, emotion regulation is very much a culturally specific idea. Our old friend Dr. David Lancey reports on a study of the Kong people in the Kalahari Desert, which states that, quote, adults are completely tolerant of a child's temper tantrum and 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, end quote. 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're doing it so that we won't be scared of their children and call the police. So I'm just going to kind of leave that right there and recommend that you listen to the episodes that 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 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 don't really 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's physically impossible to learn new facts or take a test. So why is emotion regulation important? Well it's important for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that emotion regulation is a critical predictor of school success. We can debate the appropriateness of asking four to six-year-olds, depending on the country in which you live, to sit still, ignore the next child over who's 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 four things about this. Firstly, maladaptive behaviors become more firmly entrenched from the preschool period onward. Secondly, 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, planning, and also through negatively affecting the quality of the student-teacher relationship, as well as peer relations. Thirdly, difficulties with emotion regulation may also be precursors for later mental health problems, antisocial behavior, and problems with substance abuse and other risk-taking behaviors during adolescence. And finally, children who have deficits in behavioral control are likely to have co-occurring academic difficulties. So when parents email me about emotion regulation, they always want to know what's normal for emotion regulation at various ages, and it's actually pretty difficult to state what's normal for a given child, because there's a great deal of interaction between the child's genetic and biological capabilities and their interactions with their parents. There's a great deal of evidence in the literature that a successful attachment relationship often precedes successful emotion regulation. And this is not to say that children who don't have a secure attachment relationship can't regulate their emotions, but since the child learns a great deal about emotion regulation from the parent, a secure attachment facilitates learning about emotion regulation. Researchers assess the security of attachment by looking for a few different things.

Separation distress, with a peak onset commonly seen around nine months. Differentiated patterns of greeting the attached caregiver compared to other caregivers around the same period. A secure base behavior, which means confidently exploring when the caregiver is nearby and attentive, and retreating to the caregiver when threatened. Effective sharing, which is about routine automatic sharing of pleasurable discoveries with the caregiver, likely including joint visual attention, which means pointing to draw attention in Western cultures. And finally, through the child's behavior in what's called the strange situation procedure, and I'll link to a video of this process in the notes, although this is harder to assess outside the lab environment. Assuming a secure attachment relationship exists, this child is likely to pass through several stages at times that are moderated by the child's genetics and biology, and their relationship with the attached caregiver. So here go the stages. As an infant, innate physiological mechanisms prevent the infant from overstimulation or arousal, and this is why infants turn away from too much stimulation and they self-soothe by sucking. The child's temperament affects how they respond to stimuli through individual differences in the time that it takes to respond to a stimulus and the level of the child's response, and can in turn impact how the caregiver responds.

So 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 around 9 to 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'd 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 they expect their child to stop, listen, and obey when they say no. The capacity for control of attention begins to emerge towards the end of the child's first year and continues developing throughout the preschool and school years, and choosing what to pay attention to is a key component of emotion regulation. By the end of the second year, toddlers show what's called deviation anxiety when they commit or are about to commit a forbidden behavior, often involving spontaneous self-corrections which are mediated by language, so they might say no, can't, and get 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 the desired behavior. The child finds it very difficult to hold a prohibition in their mind for longer than a few minutes, and it's thus simply not realistic to prohibit a behavior even repeatedly and expect the child to refrain from that behavior on an ongoing basis, especially when it's something that's emotionally charged. So for example, 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 who's 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're also shifting from being more interested in the process of reaching a goal, so when they were younger they might have started painting a dinosaur and then call it a house if it ends up looking like a house, whereas older children want to reach specific goals which requires focused motivation. Their ability to recall and internalize representation of what appropriate behavior looks like is developing, and they're 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 by around age four or five, so children of this age 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, for example approach a dog that they're slightly afraid of because the dog has a fluffy coat that they want to pet, and it 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 achieve success at something, they may attribute the success to powerful others like parents 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's necessary and appropriate to regulate their displays of emotions, for example we're in a restaurant now and mama's going to be mad if I have a tantrum so I'd better whine to let her know I want ice cream instead. One study found that about half of the children with behavior problems in preschool, especially boys, continued to have problems at school age, whereas about half of them showed improvement. So there's a 50-50 chance that if your child is struggling with emotion regulation at age four or five that things are going to get better by themselves in a couple of years, but there's also an even chance 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's the child's experience that determines which connections are retained and which ones die off or are pruned as it's called. Infants who were once very flexible in terms of how they responded to stimuli thus 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 parents, and their brain. 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 to 24 months and at around age seven the majority of synaptic pruning that's going to happen occurs in this part of the brain, which means the years up until this age help to determine which synapses are pruned and thus how our children will respond to incidents requiring emotion and regulation in the future. So throughout this period it was really interesting to see that the research shows that excessively controlling behavior by the mother was related to child non-compliance and by about age four negative patterns of interaction between parents and children are clearly established and may be the precursors to the kinds of coercive interaction that has been implicated in the emergence of more serious problem behaviors among older children. It's also pretty clear that the period between age two and about four and five can be a frustrating one for the parent as you see signs that emotion regulation is developing and then the child may appear to backslide. Their ability to use emotion regulation may depend on their physical and emotional state at the time. A child who's well fed, well rested and calm may be able to resist their sibling deliberately trying to annoy them. A child who's hungry, tired and whose sibling has been trying to annoy them all day may well not be able to overcome the impulse to lash out. And this means that just because the child did it last week or knows hands aren't for hitting doesn't mean they can necessarily overcome that impulse today.

Dr. Claire Kopp has argued that emotion regulation begins to arise in situations that are novel and not too distressful. In situations where there are strong social sanctions for incorrect behavior and caregivers are not available to remind the child what behavior is expected and where the child's ability to achieve a desired outcome is threatened but not to the point of major discomfort and behavioral disorganization. Her reasoning is that the child's responses to familiar situations are highly routinized and do not demand the child make a plan and situations that overload the child inhibit the child's ability to think in an organized way. Dr. Kopp points out that with much of parenting there's a dance involved in the development of emotion regulation where the leading partners change places often. Sometimes both the child and caregiver work together to regulate the child's emotions. Sometimes the caregiver is unavailable and the child must act by themselves.

On other occasions the caregiver struggles to calm an emotionally out of control child. There is no one recipe for success but it seems as though generally sensitive caregiving in which the caregiver attempts to meet the child's physical and emotional needs combined with normative periods of absence where the child practices self-regulation with the understanding that the caregiver will return are needed for this capability to develop. And all of this depends on the biological factors at play particularly the two subsystems of the autonomic nervous system which are the sympathetic nervous system which increases output to deal with challenges, increases heartbeat, dilated pupils etc and the parasympathetic nervous system which conserves the body's energy, rests vital organs, constricts pupils and slows the heart rate and is thus thought to perform an important role in individuals ability to regulate their state activity and emotion. So the autonomic nervous system's job is to maintain the body's homeostasis by increasing or decreasing activities of certain organs through the vagus nerve and it's possible to actually physically measure changes in heart rate which are associated with the frequency of breathing which tells us about the vagus nerve's ability to increase or suppress this activity. Some children are genetically predisposed to engage in this vagal suppression which is associated with using more positive coping strategies on a difficult task while another study found that children whose parents reported emotion regulation difficulties had lower levels of vagal suppression. When children are unable to physiologically regulate their emotions they can't use adaptive emotion regulation behaviors and require a great deal of parental assistance and support.

Children who don't have strong physiological emotion regulation capabilities and who also don't get support from their mothers when they experience negative emotions are both reported and observed to be less emotionally regulated. So while the development of the physiological capabilities are important, researchers think that self-regulation develops through the interaction of multiple factors. It isn't just a question of waiting for higher order control systems to come online, it's the interaction between these physiological systems and the environment, again that's you parents, that the child experiences every day. Different neural systems can become effective on different timelines and interact with each other in unique ways as children develop and the outcomes of these interactions give children a repertoire of habits that they can use to understand their emotions, control their emotions and generate emotional responses. And researchers think that small changes in children's early executive function can have a really important effect on their later development. So attention paid to this topic now is likely to be beneficial for both parent and child in later years. So now we've looked at some of the physiological changes that occur, let's look at your role in understanding your child's developing emotion regulation. Infants' brains are primed to organize stimulation from the environment and develop self-regulatory functions over time. Our brains are literally designed to search for, find and impose order and meaning on experience and it's the interactions between these naturally developing capabilities as children seek out competence and control over their surroundings and caregivers who provide certain kinds of stimuli and help the child to regulate themselves that supports the child in developing their own self-regulation skills.

Now it's absolutely clear from the literature that the securely attached parent and particularly the mother, but the father also makes unique contributions that we'll talk about later, have a high impact on a child's developing emotion regulation. In fact, in infancy, maternal sensitivity, which means providing children with successful experiences of changing their environment, using emotion-related words when speaking to children, supporting children's decisions and goals and having a generally positive disposition are associated with better executive function performance at ages two and three. On the other hand, caregivers who frequently use a negative tone, for example, being hostile or harsh to the child, using power over the child, belittling or taunting the child, scolding, making angry statements, making threats, making derogatory remarks, that kind of thing, physically stimulating the child's body, like clapping their hands, making their legs kick when they don't want to do these things, pulling, pushing or picking an older child up when they don't want to be picked up, restricting the child's movements, not responding to the child in an appropriate way, for example, not providing food when the child's hungry and asserting verbal control through directing the child's activity, excessive pickiness, escalating irritability, telling the child what to do. These are all associated with lower levels of executive function. The effect seems to be strongest among parents who pay most attention to negative behavior rather than positive behavior. As the child gets older, these harsh disciplinary practices and controlling behavior, things like taking over tasks when the child wants to do it themselves, may inhibit the development of child behaviors that support autonomy when the mother is unavailable. There are complex interactions with gender, with possibly responding to this over-controlling through passive non-compliance and girls responding with active non-compliance, although it isn't exactly clear why this is the case. In one study, adults were more likely to attend to girls' less intense communication and to boys' more intense communication, even though the behaviors of the children were essentially the same at 13 months of age. 11 months later, though, there were differences in the behavior of the children of different genders.

Boys were more assertive and girls talked to teachers more. And by responding to children differentially according to their gender, we may perpetuate stereotypes of how children of different genders behave. Another finding observed throughout the literature is the mother's positive guiding and reinforcing behavior is helpful, but negative behavior is even more impactful. So unfortunately, it isn't enough to just shower our child with positive behaviors and expect that these will somehow outweigh the negative ones. We also need to work on minimizing the negative behaviors. So what happens when the relationship between you and your child becomes dysregulated? Dr. John Gottman has written extensively about marital relationship breakdown, and some of these ideas are also relevant to parents' interactions with their children.

Specifically, what he calls flooding occurs when one person experiences another's negative emotional cues as unexpected, unprovoked, intense, overwhelming, and disorganizing. And disorganizing in this context is highly similar to a child's disorganized attachment relationship, which means they experience anxiety or fright without being able to find any solutions. These feelings are assumed to lead to emotional escape conditioning where the flooded person is hypervigilant to the cues that bring on the flooding and begins to distort cues that are ambiguous. So ones that are similar to the flooding cues, which in turn makes the person more prone to experience flooding. Flooding disrupts higher order cognitive processes like those used in problem solving, which compromises the person's ability to respond effectively and also means the flooded person will do almost anything to stop the interaction. So bringing this into more concrete language, we might imagine a parent-child relationship where the child does something like resist getting in the car seat every day when you're trying to get out the door in the morning.

Every day without fail, the child refuses to get in the car seat. They scream and they say, I'm not going in the car seat ever, ever, ever, ever. And the parent has to get to work. You're stressed and you're late and your child is screaming and you just want the screaming to stop. You can't leave your child like you can slam the door on your partner. You have to get your child into the car seat and to daycare and then get to work. And these are the conditions where you're likely to speak sharply to your child or even scream at them or push them in the car seat and potentially even hit them. And then maybe one day your child says, I'm not going in the bath. And it sounds similar enough to I'm not going in the car seat ever, ever, ever, ever. That instead of trying to find out why your child doesn't want to go in the bath, your brain immediately snaps to car seat mode and you start to get flooded by these ambiguous stimuli as well. And the more that parents are prone to emotional flooding, the more likely they are to misclassify ambiguous child's emotions as anger and then respond with flooding. And once you're flooded, you physically can't solve problems with your child. You're in this environment of escalating mutual coercion and anger that may actually interfere with your child's ability to develop the skills they need to regulate their own emotions. And it also starts to form a cycle that both of you feel as though you just can't get out of, which is stressful to both of you and detrimental to both of you as well because it depletes your emotional resources and causes you to be less patient or less engaged in emotional events. It turns out the household environment is also really important to the development of emotion regulation. The degree of household chaos, things like noise, crowding and lack of routines may be particularly important in parents' abilities to regulate their own emotions in challenging situations. Your brain has to perform the same tasks that your child's brain is learning to do. So if your brain is consistently overwhelmed by noise and mess and other environmental conditions that you find chaotic, it can be difficult to divert attention from those things, regulate your own emotions and focus on supporting your child when they are behaving badly. Just like children, some parents are better at regulating their emotions than others. And one study found that mothers with poor executive function responded to children's misbehavior with harsh negative parenting, while mothers with better executive function did not respond to children's misbehavior in a negative way. Even the strongest executive function capability may not be effective at supporting self-regulation in the face of challenging behavior from a child if the broader family context is one of chronic chaos. So the first thing to do to improve your own emotion regulation ability is to try to reduce the chaos in your own household. One thing you can do is to keep a diary for a week or two to identify the times of the day when you feel stressed and what is the trigger of that stress, both the immediate and underlying causes. Perhaps the immediate cause was a fight with your partner about something they bought that you felt they didn't really need, but the underlying cause is a discrepancy in the way in which you manage money more generally.

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising by now to find that siblings also have interactions related to how their emotion regulation developed through their relationships with their mothers. One study found that children who were insecurely attached to their mothers at 12 months old were more aggressive in their conflicts with a younger sibling at age six, while another found that securely attached older siblings were more likely to try to sue the toddler during parental separation than less secure older siblings. Children who had extreme difficulties forming an attachment with their mothers were more likely to seek out comfort from a younger sibling, possibly because they have difficulties distinguishing between their distress and the distress of others. Each person in the family experiences the family in a different way, and attachment security with the mother was much more closely related to sibling jealousy for an older sibling, whereas sibling behaviors were more important for younger siblings. One study found that younger toddlers had a more difficult time regulating their jealousy when they were not allowed to play with their parent and an exciting new toy before their sibling, and when the parents did attend to the younger child first, the younger child was then less jealous of the older sibling, while the older sibling played with the parent and the new toy, as if being first left them contented and better able to regulate their jealousy. Some researchers see the sibling relationship as a training ground for childhood aggression, and warn that toddlers who interact with a behaviorally dysregulated jealous older sibling who is physically stronger and more likely to instigate conflict may be at risk for emotion regulation disorders, while toddlers who have emotionally regulated, cooperative, caring older siblings may be less likely to experience behavioral dysregulation. One protective factor could be a positive marital relationship and the parents' use of discussion and problem solving, which could model these skills for children. It's also possible that spouses who create a positive family environment filled with positive emotions creates less of a reason for siblings to be jealous because they know there's enough love and joy to go around. It's possible that parents don't provide enough support to help siblings interact with each other.

Parents probably pretty often say don't snatch the toy and don't hit your sibling, but much more rarely anything to help the child to know what to say and do. One program that trained children on seven competencies, and these were initiating play with a sibling, accepting a sibling's invitation to play, appropriately declining an invitation to play, taking the perspective of another, identifying feelings of self and others, regulating emotions and dealing with angry feelings, and problem solving and conflict management, was successful at improving the sibling relationship according to both parent reports and independent observer reports. This program was used with siblings aged four to eight, so you might be able to help your older sibling interact with your younger one, but you're going to have to wait a bit before you can get your 18-month-old to stop hitting their sibling. The father actually also plays a unique role in developing emotion regulation in children. The father's typically more playful and physically robust style of play may be important for the child's ability to regulate emotional arousal, possibly by maintaining emotional arousal within a pleasurable range during physical bouts of play, for example, tickling enough to be fun but not so much as to feel relentless to the child, which can help the child to read other children's emotions during physical play on the playground. Physically playful fathering in the preschool years is also related to sibling cooperation, children's emotional decoding skills, and children's liking by their peers, but assessments of father-infant attachment and fathering quality in infancy are not related to these things. In other words, it seems to matter less what interactions the father had with the infant than what interactions the father has with a toddler, at least when it comes to emotion regulation. And once the child is old enough to direct the father-child interactions, researchers say we should let the children do this. Children who engage in non-directive, non-coercive physical play with their dads get along better with peers than those whose dads were also physical but were very bossy.

Another study found that harsh parenting is linked to child aggression. Dr. John Gottman says the research strongly supports the involvement of emotionally present fathers who validate children's feelings and offer comfort in times of distress. And I should note that research on two mother families is highly unusual, and it is possible that one mother could perform more of a roughhousing role typically ascribed to fathers, or both mothers could share this role. So now the part you've all been waiting for, what can we do to help or support our children in developing emotion regulation? Well, there's a lot of attention being paid to this topic in schools at the moment, and the curriculum that I see being discussed most often in parenting groups is called zones of regulation. So I shelled out the 70 bucks to buy it so I could tell you about it. It's essentially a series of lessons designed to help children understand what emotions are, how to recognize them in themselves and others, and how to control their own emotions. These kinds of curricula are typically designed and tested by professors, so I was pretty surprised to find that the author Leah Kuipers, I hope I'm saying that right, actually began using these ideas in the curriculum as an occupational therapist and then extended them into the curriculum for her master's thesis. I also looked around for peer-reviewed research supporting the program, and I'm afraid I didn't find any. A search of zones of regulation in scholarly databases gets you no hits on anything that evaluates the quality or efficacy of the program. So I was pretty disappointed to see in the acknowledgments section of the book a thanks to teachers in two different school districts, implying that the curriculum has already been widely disseminated by two thousand eleven when the book was published, and given how often I see it mentioned in parenting forums, it's taking off like wildfire. There's a research around the zones of regulation section on the curriculum's website, which contains the literature review from Leah Kuipers' master's thesis, a description of the implementation of the curriculum in eight kindergarten students with not enough statistical analysis done to tell us much, a proposal for a study in Bravard Public Schools in Florida, and a poster presentation, which is how academic research is often presented at conferences, which described a study finding no differences between the 31 students who were taught using the curriculum compared to 15 students who served as a control group, although it's possible that this result occurred due to a poorly designed study rather than to the effects of the curriculum. Researchers who develop these kinds of programs are often pretty picky about how the implementers of the programs are trained and how they deliver the program. You might recall from the episode on growth mindset that Dr. Carol Dweck once explained away the fact that another researcher hadn't been able to find a statistically significant impact of her growth mindset program because they hadn't implemented the program correctly, so it's pretty surprising to find a curriculum on a topic as big and nebulous as emotion regulation that teachers can implement with no training at all beyond reading a book. So overall, I have to say that the evidence supporting the zones curriculum is not very strong. I didn't see any super red flags in the curriculum itself except for one exercise that involves putting a purple stick in a cup on the student's desk when the teacher observes the student performing behavior that makes the teacher think I'm having good thoughts about you and an orange stick in the cup when the student exhibits a negative behavior, which sounds pretty much like a behavior management system to me. The aim of the lesson is to help children learn that our behavior impacts the feelings of those around us, but I think the lesson takes it one step too far by rewarding and punishing certain behaviors. So all this is to say that if zones is being used in your child's classroom and they seem to be benefiting, then there probably isn't any harm in continuing with it and perhaps your school should volunteer to participate in a research study so we could actually see some objective evidence on it. The other resource I would recommend is Dr. John Gottman's book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, which has been expanded into a curriculum called Tuning into Kids, which has peer-reviewed evidence of its efficacy. Yay! I started reading Dr. Gottman's book at the end of this episode, and I have to say I was a bit nervous about it because I haven't been doing anything specifically to raise an emotionally intelligent child, and I was worried I'd been neglecting something big or perhaps even doing things completely wrong. So you can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to find that the principles of respectful parenting align very, very well with this approach. And if you've been using RAI or respectful parenting, then chances are you've actually probably been doing quite a lot to raise an emotionally intelligent child.

But if you want to take this to the next level, then I definitely recommend getting the book because it has some tests you can do to assess your own knowledge about emotions and lots of concrete suggestions for fine-tuning the interactions you have with your child to better support their developing emotion regulation. I hope this helps you to better understand your child's progress towards regulating your own emotions and how you can support them in doing this. You can find the references for the 20 books and academic papers that I read in preparation for this episode at YourParentingMojo.com forward slash regulating emotions. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Don't forget to subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com to receive new episode notifications and the free guide to seven parenting myths that we can leave behind. And join the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group for more respectful research-based ideas to help kids thrive and make parenting easier for you. I'll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.