Strategies for safely discharging anger from the body or releasing tension:

• Use play-dough for squeezing.
• Provide paper for tearing and scrunching.
• Supply small plastic bubble wrap for squeezing and large bubble wrap for stomping on.
• Explore various hand fidgets like the Tangle Jr. or Panic Pete (pictured above).
• Fill balloons with flour for squeezing.
• Provide Kinetic sand, beeswax or clay for squeezing and molding.
• Use a Hoberman Sphere for dispersing tension.

Cognitive approaches to emotional self-regulation:

(Use these when your child is calm and in a state where learning can take place; not in the heat of the moment.)

• To increase emotional literacy and provide suggestions for how to work non-destructively with strong feelings, I highly recommend the wonderful series of children’s books, “When I Feel…” written by child therapist Cornelia Maude Spelman. She writes clearly and in a way that’s very appealing to children, using animal families as her stories’ main characters.
• Provide as much consistency and stability as possible for your child. Environmental stress, unpredictability, and instability can exacerbate emotional dysregulation.
• Create a mood meter to help your child label and identify her emotions.
• Validate your child’s feelings. Teach her that different people may have different feelings about the same event, and that’s okay.
• Since children often model your example, share how you are feeling with your child and model ways you stay calm. For example, if you’re feeling frustrated with a computer problem you are having, (okay, perhaps I’m projecting here) say something like, “I’m feeling frustrated. I’m going to take a break and calm down before I work on this some more.”
• Teach your child to think about different ways of responding to situations that trigger emotional outbursts. Role play and encourage multiple solutions. Discuss what the consequences may be for each response.
• Use tools like The Incredible 5 Point Scale, developed by Kari Dunn Buron, to help children bring awareness to the stages of emotional dysregulation and control their emotional responses. See a sample scale here. Creating individualized scales is a beautiful way to break down a child’s response to specific situations or feelings.  Labeling what the behavior feels like, looks like, and what tools can be used each step of the way can prevent your child from escalating from a 1 to a 5.
• Teach positive self-talk by having her quietly say something like, “I can stay calm” or “I can do this.”
• Praise your child’s efforts to regulate her emotions in order to reinforce positive behaviors. Your praise can help her develop a  positive self-image regarding emotional control.

~Karina Black, occupational therapist in Boulder, CO

Re-posted with permission from Karina’s website: skills4lifeot.com.

Karina can be contacted at karina.skills4life@gmail.com.

The post Community Spotlight: Tools To Enhance Emotional Self-Regulation appeared first on Mackintosh Academy.

Yes, I’m a proud mamma watching my daughter involve herself fully in an activity that is far beyond her years and non-stereotypical for her gender. But I’m also a PhD psychotherapist and school psychologist here at Mackintosh. And I couldn’t help but notice that soldering had helped my sometimes-a-particle, sometimes-a-wave daughter achieve an emotional state that is really, truly hard for her.

Was it just her or is there something about the activity that could help other kids?

I work with a three-part strategy that helps kids (and adults…) learn to calm their bodies and minds. First, I try to help them realize what it feels like to be elevated or dysregulated – how does it feel a frenzied “10” on the scale of emotional regulation? And how does it feel to be more regulated, say below a “5”? The second step is working to discover strategies that can help move lower on this scale – to get from a 10 back into a more manageable range. And the third step is adding the components of self-awareness and language – being able to say, “I’m starting to feel [blank], I really need to [blank].”

By far, the most difficult part of this process is the first step. How often do you have those moments of clarity in which, just for a split second, you look from outside yourself to find that you’re gritting your teeth with stress, or spinning your mind in anger, or clenching your shoulders high with tension, or even vibrating with excitement (and not in the immediate aftermath of a trip to Ozo…)? Even as adults it can be tremendously difficult to see the forest for the trees – it can be desperately hard to recognize and monitor our emotional states. And we’re supposed to know better!

Now imagine how hard this awareness is for a child. Nothing you say can help a child truly know how these emotional states feel in their bodies. No wall chart with cartoon faces of emotions or silly board game that “leads” from angry to calm can allow a child to experience these very real states of being. I know how to help a child process an elevated state: we can work carefully with traumatic memories or I can encourage struggles in the therapy room with challenging toys.

One of my clients finds calmness with my Labrador. For another, it’s sifting kinetic sand. But for some kids (and, again, some adults…) it can be nearly impossible to find an exercise or game or activity that creates real, profound, organic calmness.

So I’ve started introducing soldering with some of my clients – just the ones that show interest and have been difficult to reach in other ways. Here’s the thing: if you’ve ever done a soldering kit (SparkFun or another), you know that it’s impossible to get anything done without steady hands and a pinpoint focus on the tiny parts in each step. Deeply involved in a soldering kit, I’ve seen tricky clients find a level of focus that I’ve been unable to help them reach in any other way.

That’s the first step, this true feeling of focused calm. From this point forward in our journey together, this feeling can provide a known target that we can aim for. I don’t expect my young clients to carry a soldering iron and a pair of clippers in a fanny pack wherever they go, but once they know this experience of self-regulation, we can work to find it in other ways. And for absolutely everyone I’ve ever worked with, this state just feels good. True focus, precision and selfless involvement may be something kids (and adults) have never felt before.

Take it for what it’s worth: just an idea. But my daughter and now my clients have helped me to place soldering into my quiver of ideas that can artificially create a first experience of calmness that can create a template for self-regulation moving forward.

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