The science of teaching kids how to cope with emotions

Written by Rachel de Barros Oliveira, Ph.D. Candidate McGill University

Emotion regulation is an important skill that needs to be developed over time. But how can you help your child cope with all emotions?

Before telling you how you can help your child, I want to take a minute to tell you more about emotions. Emotions help us to respond to a perceived or real environmental stimulus. Even though we don’t have a perfect definition of what an emotion is, we can define them as a biological state that results from feelings, behaviors, and thoughts.

We feel a variety of emotions (as we talked about in this Instagram post) and knowing them is one of the first steps toward good emotion regulation. But what is emotion regulation?

**Emotion regulation (ER)** is when a person understands their different emotions and can influence when and how they experience and express them. An individual that is not capable of managing their emotional response to everyday events is more susceptible to psychopathology.

To help with Emotion regulation, different strategies have been used. Over the years they have been divided as:

• Adaptive and/or protective (when they successfully reduce negative state and restore emotional balance);

• Maladaptive and/or risk factors (if they only provide short-term relief and fail to reduce negative affect).

Adaptive ER strategies lead to good psychological well-being whereas maladaptive ER strategies have a strong association with a wide range of psychopathology (depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and eating disorder symptoms).

A review in 2009 found that three emotion regulation strategies have been associated with protection against psychopathology (adaptive):

• Reappraisal (when you try to look at the positive side of a stressful situation);

• Problem-solving (conscious attempts to change a stressful situation or contain its consequences – don’t modify emotion, but modify or eliminate the stressor);

• Acceptance (component of mindfulness, the ability to be present and accept thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they are to promote good outcomes).

Three strategies have been associated with risk factors for psychopathology (maladaptive):

• Suppression (suppression of emotional expression – could work in short term, but over time is less effective in regulating emotions);

• Avoidance (the opposite of acceptance);

• Rumination the habit of obsessing over negative events that happened in the past (source: Verywell Mind)

And how you can help your child? First, we should all learn more about emotions in general. Knowing how to distinguish between different emotions is the key to knowing which tool will help. Another good thing to keep in mind is trying to use one of the three adaptative ER strategies (reappraisal, problem-solving, and/or acceptance) and try to avoid the maladaptive strategies (suppression, avoidance, rumination).

Don’t forget that is never too late to improve your emotion regulation skills and to help your children to master this skill as well. This is also a process that takes time and patience (lots of it!). If you tried to use an adaptative strategy and you still lost control of your emotions this does not mean that you failed or that everything is ruined. We are humans and dealing with bad days and out-of-control days is part of emotion regulation skills.

How many emotions you could describe now? What about starting learning about a new emotion today?