082: Regulating emotions: What, When, & How

We’ve already covered emotion regulation a few times on the show: there were these older short episodes on the more recent one (https://yourparentingmojo.com/selfreg/) on Dr. Stuart Shanker’s book Self-Reg. But I realized I’d never done the episode that should underlie all of these, which discusses what actually is emotion regulation and when (for crying out loud!) our children will be able to do it. So we cover that in this episode, as well as some resources to help you support your child in developing this capability, the most important of which is Dr. John Gottman’s book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child (https://amzn.to/2S5mrqR) [affiliate link].   Download your free workbook! If you’re in the thick of struggles with emotion regulation right now and you find yourself punishing or thinking about punishing your child for behavior that’s driving you crazy, you should definitely download the How to Stop Punishing Your Child (And What to Do Instead) workbook that gives you strategies to help both of you cope better with stressful situations. Just enter your name and email address below! Read Full Transcript (#) 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 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 realized 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 in developing this capability, so we’re going to do that today. Surprisingly, there is no single definition of what is an emotion. Most emotion theorists describe emotional behavior in ter