Temper, temper! Developing the ability to regulate emotions
Posted on Nov 03, 2009 by Pasco Fearon
It was a normal morning with a young toddler – up at 6am, milk, a bit of Cbeebies, then time for something to eat. I gave my son his normal breakfast and he promptly burst into a rage, crumbling his bitesize cereal into smaller and smaller pieces with his hands, crying loudly. What was I to do? Firstly, keep calm and try to forget that: a) I needed him to eat something; b) I didn’t want to throw his breakfast in the bin; and c) I needed to leave for work on time.
My initial strategy was to ask him to calm down in a soothing voice and then to leave him to cool down by himself at the table for a short time, rather than breathing over him. I got my breakfast, sat down and pretended that everything was OK, reassuring him with calming tones. He was still very upset, unable to communicate his source of anguish. I tried to take the bowl away – “No” came a sad voice. I asked him if he wanted to eat it, “No” he said, all the while with both hands in the bowl, still crying. I offered him my spoon and we turned a corner – he liked the idea of eating his breakfast with a big spoon, and ate all his breakfast up!
Parenthood offers many challenges but managing another’s very delicate - yet tempestuous - emotions, is one that many feel unprepared for. How do you help your child deal with their emotions without forming another unhelpful connection – such as giving in and providing chocolate spread on toast in front of the TV every morning? Research is beginning to show two things that most parents probably already have some sense of – firstly, children vary enormously in their abilities to manage or regulate their emotions. Secondly, parents can make quite a big different to how children regulate their emotions. Finally, to parent effectively, parents need to manage their own emotions too – often it’s not keeping your cool that is the road to parenting disasters! Before babies are born, people often say “you’re eating for two now!”Well, after the baby is born, it’s more like “you’re regulating emotions for two now” (not counting your partner’s! That’s another story…). This reflects something close to the heart of the EROS project. Parenting involves regulating one’s own emotions (intrapersonal emotion regulation) in order to help another regulate their emotions (interpersonal), and often there’s no obvious recipe for doing this. One big role for your own emotional arousal or upset then is that it explodes your capacity to think laterally and creatively, so without controlling one’s own feelings of frustration, it’s hard to help someone else deal with theirs.
Crucially, children’s early emotion regulation has proved to be an important factor in predicting the outcome of their social development. But how can parents help this development? Our project aims to look at the intra- and interpersonal processes conducive to successful emotional development by specifically looking at the quality of mother-infant interaction in response to emotionally challenging events.
Our study uses a longitudinal design, assessing children’s ability to cope with lab-based mildly distressing events at 15 months, 26 months and 37 months, as well as the strategies that parents use to support their infant. During these sessions, infants are observed during a fear-eliciting task (interaction with a stranger) and a frustration task (separation from an exciting, new toy), while the level of support mothers can provide is manipulated.
Previous research has found that sensitive and responsive caregiving can promote emotion regulation (Thompson, 1994). Despite this finding, very little research has examined the psychological processes in the parent that give rise to these individual differences in the quality and effectiveness of their emotional support. Our project therefore aims to firstly further knowledge into the influence of parenting on infants’ regulation through comparing situations where no parenting support is available to those in which maternal involvement can be provided. Additionally, our study employs both interviews and “live” video-feedback methodology to elicit parents’ views and feelings about their children’s emotional behaviour in an attempt to explore the importance of parents’ social understanding in effectively supporting their infants. Psychologists, especially developmental psychologists, are very good at observing parents and children, but they can be rather bad at asking parents what they are doing or why they are doing it. We want to learn as much as we can from parents, first hand, about how they approach the tricky task of regulating their child’s emotions.
The project is still in its early stages; we are currently halfway through the first wave of assessments. Preliminary analysis of data suggests that parenting plays an important role in the emotion regulation of infants, influencing both the use and efficiency of certain regulatory skills. For instance, with even just verbal support from their mothers, children were less likely to look at the unobtainable, attractive toy, which is an important way of dealing with frustration. Crucially, this suggests that mothers were able to help in the process of shifting infants’ attention away from the toy by providing them with opportunities to divert their attention towards something else. Mums have sung songs, pointed out items around the room or talked to their child reassuringly. We have seen a complete range of child behaviours and parenting strategies and look forward to continuing the assessment process and providing the next chapter of our findings! And for all you parents, hang in there while we finish our study (unfortunately, we can’t promise to entirely solve the problem, but we hope we will move that little bit closer to nailing down the strategies that work and why)!
By Anne Lancaster, Frances Warren and Pasco Fearon
Please leave your comments on this article below.
Very interesting research. I have two children 3 and 5 years.
By Breda on 17/12/2009