How babies and children develop emotional regulation

Emotional regulation is the ability to experience, express and regulate our emotions. Our society is a little obsessed with getting young children to manage their emotions quickly; tiny babies are often expected to settle themselves back to sleep when distressed and toddlers can be expected to control their tempers. Neither are realistic and in this blog and the next one we’re going to be exploring how children slowly develop their emotional regulation skills and how you can support them.

Emotional expression from birth: From birth babies are able to express their emotions; through crying, smiling and other behaviours. But they don’t yet understand their emotions; they feel like overwhelming physical sensations.

Brain development: Babies brains are very premature at birth and there isn’t much wiring connecting the different parts. When you interact with your baby this builds the connections in their brain. How you respond to your baby influences the connections that they make. This is the case for speech and other developmental skills as well as emotional development.

The importance of attachment: By responding to your baby’s emotions you are helping them learn to trust you and build a relationship with you. They will feel safe and secure in expressing their emotions and slowly start to understand them.

Language development: Language and emotional awareness development can go hand-in-hand. As your baby grows into a toddler they can start to recognise the physical signs for an emotion and start to use the words to describe these emotions. However, the part of the brain that uses language can switch off - in adults too! - when experiencing a really strong emotion. Which means that toddlers can only sometimes find the words to describe what they are feeling.

Self-soothing is impossible: Self-soothing, or self-settling, in a baby is not possible; their brains are just not wired up to achieve this. As they grow into toddlers, around 2 or 3 years old, they will start to be able to soothe some of their milder emotions themselves. However, before this, or when a strong emotion hits an older child, they will need adult support. Even as adults we can sometimes feel overwhelmed by our emotions and need someone to support us.

Next time we’re going to be considering how parents and other caregivers can support emotional regulation in baby’s, toddlers and preschoolers.