Talking to your child about Emotional Regulation: The Zones of Regulation

Last week in our Coffee and Chat we discussed (amongst other things!) how difficult it is for our children to regulate their emotions.

The background (skip this bit if you just want to get to the strategy bit!!)

I know that this was the first major 'red flag' for us with our son. He was having these absolutely wild emotional responses that were completely disproportionate to the thing that had happened. He would drop something on the floor and he would 'explode'. I would sing the wrong lyric to a song, and that would be IT! The beans would touch the chicken goujons – Boom! We responded with behaviour management strategies (having two teachers for parents meant that we had a LOT of behaviour management strategies up our sleeves, all of which were attempted MANY times!!), but nothing was working. We were both GREAT teachers. Prided ourselves on behaviour management. Ran a tight ship. But yet we were living with behaviour we wouldn't accept in our own classrooms.

We were getting everything so wrong (well, I have to publicly admit that I was getting more wrong than my husband, but he wasn't there all the time – I worked part time so I was dealing with the lion's share of the meltdowns and was completely burned out from them).

We were failing to recognise two extremely important factors – one: Masking (I'm going to come back to that next week as this email's going to get too long!!); two – emotional regulation. We didn't realise that our son was not struggling to, but was unable to mange his emotional response. This is a huge aspect of the diagnosis of both autism and ADHD, we didn't realise that at the time – but even when we did realise leading up to his diagnosis and afterwards, we didn't fully understand what it meant, and more importantly, how to help him with it.

A strategy that actually worked!

One of the things that really helped us to support him better was introducing The Zones of Regulation, a tool to help him to start to identify his own feelings and then build some tools to help him manage those feelings.

The Zones of Regulation shows children that all emotions are valid and are part of the human experience. We all feel ALL the feelings, at numerous points every day, and that's fine, that's normal. The tool uses 4 colours to group feelings, making them really simple and accessible for children.

Blue – sick, tired, bored.

Green – calm, positive, ready to learn.

Yellow – excited, silly, 'fidgety' (that's my son's addition!), anxious, frustrated, tense.

Red – angry, out of control, (fight or flight), explosive.

You can google it and get a whole load of visuals that can really help. There are some really cool visuals using Disney's Inside Out movie characters to illustrate the colours.

As I teach in my online programmes, trying to talk to our children about emotional regulation when they are in a state of emotional dysregulation is NOT going to work!! We need to find ways when they are in the 'green zone' (when they are completely regulated!) to chat about it, to introduce it in non-confrontational ways. Here are some ideas for how to do it:

• Display a visual and start talking about your own feelings. Let them know that you are keeping a track of your own emotions and talk to them about the colours. Give them examples where you have felt each of the colours today or over the last couple of days. Let them see that it's okay to feel all the colours, it's normal.
• Talk about a time when they felt any one of the colours (perhaps avoid talking about red immediately as that might be triggering to them, they might feel threatened by that). Get them talking about what things make them feel blue/green/yellow.
• Play games with them – give them scenarios using made up characters and get them to identify which colour the character would be feeling. You can also do this when you are reading books/watching shows with them, talk about which colour the character is probably feeling.
• Save a Zones of Regulation image to your phone, or create something in your notes page. Set a reminder to do a check-in every 30-45mins with them. They can point to the zone they are in at that particular time. As they get used to this, they will become more confident in telling you why they think they are in that zone – and if they're not in the green zone, you can discuss things that would help them get into the green zone.

As I say, do a quick google and you'll get loads more ideas, and loads of visuals to help you implement them!

Once your child grasps the idea of ever-changing emotions and realises that other people feel all of these emotions too, they will feel less alone, less judged. They will realise that what they're feeling is perfectly normal. Encourage them to use the colours as part of their vocabulary to describe how they are feeling, check in with them regularly (every half hour to forty-five minutes, or at least every hour) to see how they're feeling and to discuss things that might help them if they feel like they're headed towards the red zone.

I'm not going to tell you this an over night fix, this takes time, it takes patience and practice. But taking baby steps towards this kind of emotional literacy is really going to help your child to feel less alone. Start by using it for yourself, in front of them, this is the least demanding thing to do. Develop your own emotional vocabulary (in this simplistic way) and model to your child how emotions are part of our every day.

Have a try and let me know how you get on!!