Confidently help your child manage their emotions with Dr. Tina Montreuil

Summary of Curious Neuron Podcast Episode 40 with guest Dr. Tina Montreuil

This is a summary of podcast episode 40, a conversation with Dr. Tina Montreuil, in which we talk about managing children’s emotions. Dr. Tina Montreuil is a professor, a psychologist, and a researcher at McGill University.

What is emotion regulation?

What are the skills necessary for emotion regulation and how do we develop them? What contributes to successful regulation? Let’s start by defining emotion regulation: it is the capacity for an individual to deal with emotions, particularly the more difficult ones. Our emotion regulation skills literally start developing from the moment we are brought home, in how our parents respond to our cries.

Co-regulation

The way parents respond to their children’s emotions sets the stage for the child’s emotion regulation. Research now shows how important it is for parents to be emotionally available to help the child co-regulate. A parent does this by validating the emotions (“this is hard”, “feelings are normal”) and tolerating the tantrums. You want to modulate your reaction to prevent a response while remaining emotionally available.

This can be very difficult for a parent. Especially if it is not the way you were parented (which is the case for most of us). We carry a lot of internalized stigmas about ourselves, that we have learnt from our childhood (“I’m a bad person”) that makes remaining emotionally available to our children very difficult. This usually starts to become an issue when a child becomes more mobile and/or verbal and starts resisting the parent’s expectations. Parental expectation of the child stirs negative emotions in the parent.

Sometimes, parents become too involved and overly protective, taking away an opportunity for growth and learning by intervening to ease a child’s pain. They do need to experience distress and learn to manage disappointment. This is why we use the term “tolerate the tantrum”—you don’t remove yourself or insert yourself, you just remain emotionally available. It could help to immerse yourself in their world: if someone took away your phone while you were using it, how would you react?

Modelling and growth

Sometimes, we don’t act the way we want. That does not make us bad parents. We carry a lot of guilt but it’s important for our kids to see examples of us falling and getting up. To see that the effort is just as important, if not more important than the outcome and that we are always working on improving ourselves. We make a mistake, and we take ownership of it, we apologize.

One critical way to make space for your child’s emotions, as well as your own, is to focus on self-care. “To be a better parent, I need time to myself.” There will always be things that “should” be done but taking time to disconnect from others’ needs and focus on yourself is crucial. This is also important for relationships: we need to set aside time to nurture our relationship with our partner outside of our children, to make sure it is whole and healthy. Better relationship dynamics between the parents lead to better home environments and healthier behaviours and emotion regulation in our children. Sometimes we need to ask for help, to speak to friends, family doctors, and therapists. It’s important to seek out and access these resources, despite hesitations regarding how they will be perceived. After all, “what really matters, what others think or how my life is going?”

Some resources: