Parents and educators of teenagers know how hard emotional control and regulation can be—especially for teens with unique learning needs. Diverse learners encounter unique challenges at home, school, and with friends and family. These challenges can mean emotional triggers can crop up at any time. That’s why building emotional control and emotional regulation in your teen is key. It’s these strategies and supports that can make all the difference when your teen faces the many real-life challenges ahead.
What is emotional control?
Emotional control describes how we manage and respond to emotional experiences in the environment, particularly stressful ones. Sometimes known as emotional regulation, emotional control can include many different behaviors. Staying calm when frustrated, disappointed, or angry and staying relaxed when excited, nervous, or frightened. Avoiding saying or doing things that may cause harm to self or others is another way we can describe emotional control.
How We Develop Emotional Control
Like other executive functioning skills, we develop emotional regulation over time. As infants, we demonstrate very little emotional regulation. We instead rely on emotional responses to communicate our needs for care and comfort to the adults around us.
By our toddler and early learning years, we begin to identify emotions in ourselves and others better. This starts with core emotions like happy, sad, mad, and scared. We may not yet have the ability to control them entirely but continue to increase independence as we grow. Then, as teens and young adults, we look for emotions to develop more complexity. We begin to understand emotions like empathy, grief, and regret. We also start to understand emotion comprehension, or the appropriate responses when we ourselves or others experience an emotion. Ultimately, emotional control allows us to manage different emotions, so they don’t disrupt daily life.
Strategies & Supports to Build Emotional Control for Diverse Learners
Reduce stress.
Often when emotional regulation falls apart, it’s because our teen has experienced stress or a trigger. These environmental events can cause us to use a “fight or flight” autonomic response instead of a controlled Stop, Think, Act behavior. Look for areas in your teen’s environment where stressors can be reduced. Is your teen’s schedule packed with events and responsibilities? Are you or your family members experiencing illness, unemployment, housing transitions, or other stressful events? Look for ways to reduce stressors (or expect that your teen may struggle more in a particular season of life until the stressors resolve).
Work to meet basic needs first.
Along with reducing stressors in the environment, it’s also essential to focus on the basic needs of diverse learners. We all know it’s harder to focus and keep our cool when we’re overtired. Hangry anyone? That’s a familiar phrase because of how difficult it is to be patient and understanding if we’re hungry or dehydrated.
We’ve discussed Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory elsewhere here, but it’s good to reflect on the idea again when thinking about emotional control. Expecting your teen to show good emotional control isn’t realistic if they’re focused on basic needs like food and safety. While it can be hard to motivate teens for sufficient sleep, focusing on getting enough rest can go a long way to improving emotional control.
Schedule daily physical activity.
We already know the physical benefits of regular, consistent physical activity for our teens. But it’s also important to know that daily physical activity can also support better self-regulation and emotional control. Studies show regular physical exercise can lower emotional stress, improve study habits, and increase emotional control. Make it a priority for you and your family to enjoy physical activity together.
Create an environment of open dialogue.
There will be times where your teen does well with emotional control skills and times when it still falls apart. Whatever happens, you’ll want to have a consistent time built into your weekly schedule to have an open dialogue about your teen’s behavior. Build it into a routine, like discussing it on the way to school, when making breakfast, or before getting ready for bed. By having a regular time for dialogue, you can provide feedback when you’re teen demonstrates good emotional control in the face of adversity. You can also talk through strategies and problems outside of high-stress situations.
Narrate real-life situations and triggers for your own emotions.
When having conversations with your teen about emotional regulation, it can be helpful to talk about real-life situations and triggers you also experience. It’s easy for us to keep emotions to ourselves and not necessarily allow our teens to see the hundreds of emotional regulation responses we make throughout the day.
For example, when someone cuts you off in the parking lot for the best parking space, label the emotion and the emotional response. “Look at that! How frustrating! That wasn’t very nice of that driver. But it’s no big deal; I’ll find another spot.” Show your teen that they aren’t the only one that has difficult emotions. Narrate your emotional thoughts and how you’re handling them appropriately.
Use executive functioning tools.
Much can be said about how planning and organization tools can promote emotional control in our day-to-day activities. Like reducing stressors, helping your teen stay organized, remembering activities and events, and planning out the day can lead to fewer periods of frustration and upset. Evaluating how your teen sets and achieves goals can also lead to better emotional regulation.
Build mindfulness.
Year over year, our understanding continues to grow on why and how mindfulness meditation supports emotional regulation. There’s a strong link between teens who can practice mindfulness exercises (breath control, body scans, attending to emotional responses, etc.) and control emotions under stress. One of the single most valuable skills you can build with your child or student and research supports that learners with a variety of skill levels and abilities can be taught mindfulness activities.
To test a body scan mindfulness activity with your child, download our free .pdf download.
Emotional Control Takes Practice
While it might go without saying, it’s good to remember that emotional control takes practice. Your teen can and will make mistakes, lose their cool, or handle relationships poorly. Even the most skilled adults can still reach a breaking point from time to time. Hold your teen to the standard that you don’t expect perfection when learning to regulate emotions, but instead, you expect progress.
Further Reading
- Bazzano, A., Wolfe, C., Zylowska, L., Wang, S., Schuster, E., Barrett, C., & Lehrer, D. (2015). Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) for parents and caregivers of individuals with developmental disabilities: a community-based approach. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 24(2), 298-308.
- Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury & Recovery – What is emotion regulation, and how do we do it?
- Harvard Center on the Developing Child – Building Core Capabilities for Life
- Life Skills Advocate Blog – Executive Functioning Skills By Age: What to Look For
- Life Skills Advocate Blog – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
- National Research Council (US) and Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development; Shonkoff JP, Phillips DA, editors. From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Washington DC
- Oaten, M., & Cheng, K. (2006). Longitudinal gains in self‐regulation from regular physical exercise. British journal of health psychology, 11(4), 717-733.