Emotional regulation allows your child to adapt their response to a situation or environment. If a friend’s birthday party gets canceled, they might feel disappointed but not distraught. Or if a classmate hits them by accident with a ball in gym class, they might get upset but not furious.
Kids don’t come into the world knowing how to modify their emotions. However, through activities and exercises, they can learn to transform their initial feelings by focusing their thinking and acting with intention.
Learning how to emotionally regulate builds your child’s self-esteem and social skills. And there are many ways you can help!
Key Takeaways
- Emotional regulation is a child’s ability to manage their emotions within a situation, environment, or interaction.
- For your child to learn how to regulate their emotions, they need to practice co-regulation with you, begin to recognize emotions, and match feelings with body sensations.
- Emotional regulation activities for kids include modeling emotional regulation, practicing breathing exercises, offering a hug, checking in with your child’s senses, creating a gratitude list, making a comfort box, and creating a relaxation station.
- Additional emotional regulation activities include getting out extra energy, playing a mood card game, creating an ocean bottle, playing emotional charades, practicing mindfulness, color coding emotions, and using a mood meter.
Table of Contents
- What Is Emotional Regulation?
- First Steps in Regulating Emotions
- 14 Emotional Regulation Activities for Kids
What Is Emotional Regulation?
Emotional regulation is a child’s ability to manage or regulate their emotions based on a situation, environment, or interaction.
Imagine your child’s emotions are like a lamp. The job of emotional regulation is to keep the room well-lit. If the sun is shining, you might dim the lamp or even turn it off. When night falls, you turn the lamp on to its brightest setting.
Similarly, when a situation is making your child overexcited, emotional regulation helps them turn down the intensity of those emotions.
If a situation is making them feel low, it helps them bring their emotions back up again.
First Steps in Regulating Emotions
1) Co-Regulating Emotions as a Foundation
Before your child can learn how to regulate their own emotions, they need to understand what emotional regulation means. But this isn’t something you can easily teach them with a conversation. Instead, they need to experience it firsthand.
How does your child gain that experience if they haven’t learned how to do it yet? You can facilitate this foundational understanding by first co-regulating emotions with them.
This involves three specific things:
- Modeling calm
- Guiding through tough moments
- Providing structure
Let’s say it’s 5:00 p.m., and it’s time for your child to put away their toys. But they want to keep playing, and they begin to show signs of being frustrated (breathing more heavily, stomping their feet, raising their voice).
You can model a sense of calm by taking a slow, deep breath yourself and then speaking in a quiet tone. Then you might say, “It seems like you’re feeling frustrated. Is that true? Do you know why? I know you want to keep playing, but it’s time to get ready for dinner.”
Finally, remind them of the daily routine: when 5:00 rolls around, toys are put away. Reassure them that, just like the day before and the day before that, their toys will be waiting for them to play with again tomorrow.
If you can respond to your child’s emotional dysregulation in this way consistently and sensitively, you’ll be allowing them to feel the embodiment of emotional regulation.
2) Recognizing Emotions
Identifying emotions is the first step in learning to regulate them. When your child first experiences an emotion, they may not understand what they’re feeling.
You can help by giving them feedback. “It seems like you’re feeling scared about the sound of the thunder.”
This will give your child the language they need to name their emotions when they feel them again in a different context. If they remember how they felt when they heard thunder, they can say, “Mommy, I’m feeling scared,” the next time they feel the same way.
Being able to recognize and name their feelings prepares them for being able to respond to them.
3) Matching Feelings with Body Sensations
You can also help your child learn how their body feels when they experience an emotion.
When you can tell they’re feeling something strongly, ask them some questions to help locate specific sensations: “You seem scared. Can you point to where you feel it in your body? Does it feel like a jumpy tummy?”
Kids may find it easier to name how their bodies are feeling, such as butterflies in their tummy or a fast heartbeat, than to name the feeling itself.
Learning to pay attention in this way can help your child identify their feelings based on their physical experience.
This is especially useful if your child gets dysregulated quickly. Recognizing body sensations helps identify the early signs of strong emotions.
The sooner your child understands what they’re feeling, the easier it will be for them to find a sense of calm.
14 Emotional Regulation Activities for Kids
1) Model Emotional Regulation
Our kids are always watching us, so we can transform almost any situation into an opportunity for learning. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, either.
If you have big feelings and manage them in a way that your child can witness (“Wow, I’m feeling really frustrated right now. I’m going to take some deep breaths.”), over time, they’ll mimic those skills and learn to use them.
2) Practice Breathing Exercises
Your child may not be used to thinking about their breathing. But paying attention to it and engaging in simple exercises to slow down their breathing can settle their body.
We’ve got a handful of great breathing exercises for you and your child to try. Here’s one to start with:
Ask them to put one hand on their belly and one on their chest. Then, have them pay attention as their chest and belly rise when they take a breath and fall when they let it out.
Teach them a breathing sequence: breathe in for four counts, hold their breath for two counts, and then breathe back out for six counts. After five total rounds of counted breathing, ask your child how they’re feeling.
3) Offer a Hug
Try offering your child a hug when they begin dysregulating. This kind of secure, safe squeeze can provide a real sense of comfort. Your child feels “held” because they are literally being held! It helps oxytocin flow, which calms the nervous system.
You can also let your child know that even hugging themselves can stimulate oxytocin. So no matter where they are or who they’re with, they always have a tool they can use to regulate.
One important note: make sure your child knows that it’s always OK to say no to any kind of physical contact, including a hug.
4) Check in with Your Child’s Senses
Helping your child focus on the present moment is a great way to redirect emotional energy. You can do this by asking them to name one thing they see, one thing they hear, one thing they smell, one thing they touch, and one thing they taste.
For example, you might be in the kitchen when your child asks you for a snack. But because dinner is soon, you say no, and this triggers a meltdown. So you might engage in a call-and-response that goes something like this:
- “What do you see?” “I see a chair.”
- “What do you hear?” “I hear the pot boiling.”
- “What do you smell?” “I smell tomato sauce cooking.”
- “What are you touching?” “My feet are touching the floor.” (“How does it feel?” “Cold.”)
- “What can you taste?” “I can taste the garlic from the tomato sauce in the air.”
Helping your child ground themselves in their immediate environment by tapping into their senses helps them regulate and stay calm.
5) Create a Gratitude List
Try incorporating a gratitude shout-out into your child’s daily routine. Maybe you both name three things you’re grateful for when you sit at the table for breakfast. Or maybe you name them as part of your bedtime routine.
Having this consistent practice makes it easier to initiate at other times in the day, too. If your child is beginning to feel frustrated, angry, or anxious, you can remind them of what they’re grateful for, or even ask them to come up with some new ideas in the moment.
As you talk about these positive experiences, people, and things in your child’s life, they may be able to relax and begin to regulate their emotions.
6) Make a Comfort Box
Create a comfort box with your child when they’re not feeling emotionally dysregulated. Ask them to decorate it and then gather some of their favorite things and fun sensory objects, too.
You might consider:
- Pinwheel
- Kazoo
- Bubble wrap
- Squeezie ball
- Stuffed animal
- Crayons and paper
- Photos
When you and your child have completed the box, put it somewhere your child can access. In moments when you feel your child beginning to dysregulate, you can guide them to the comfort box and suggest they choose something inside it.
7) Create a Relaxation Station
Transform a spot in your home into a calming space. Start with objects that inspire relaxation, like pillows, a cozy blanket, or a stuffed animal. Then try one or all of these other ideas:
- Put a lamp in the space, so you can keep the lighting dim
- Add a small speaker so you can play soothing music
- Add an item with a relaxing scent, like lavender
Your child can be part of the planning. What things do they associate with a sense of calm?
They can help arrange the space, too. Once they use the space a bunch of times, their body may automatically begin relaxing when they enter it.
8) Get Out the Extra Energy
If your child is brimming with a big emotion, you may want to try preceding or even replacing a calming technique with an energy release session.
This can be super simple, like punching a pillow or squeezing a stress ball. It can also be going outside for a game of tag, racing around the block, or jump-roping as many times as they can.
Physical activity is positively connected to emotional regulation and educational outcomes.
A recent study at the University of Cambridge found that kids who engaged in more physical activity were more likely to have strong self-regulation skills, especially emotional regulation, and those skills influenced how well they did in school.
9) Play a Mood Card Game
Playing a simple mood matching game can be a fun way to help your child identify emotions.
Start by printing or cutting out images of people experiencing different emotions. (For example, find an image of a person with their hands clenched into fists and their lips pressed tightly together.)
Place the images into a bag or turn them over on a table. Have your child pick one card. Ask them:
- What emotion do you see?
- How do you know?
- Can you describe a time when you felt the same way?
- How did you handle the emotion?
- Could you have done anything different?
10) Create an Ocean Bottle
Help your child create a sensory bottle that mimics the soothing colors and motions of the ocean:
- Fill a large, clear, used bottle about ⅓ full with water
- Fill the rest with vegetable oil
- Add a few drops of blue food coloring
- Cap the bottle tightly (you can use duct tape or even a glue gun)
- Hold it sideways and tip it from side to side
Invite your child to shake the bottle and watch the “ocean waves” settle. Ask them what they notice about the bottle. For instance, does it feel cool or warm? What color is the liquid? What does it sound like when they shake it?
See if they can pinpoint how their body begins to settle down as they focus on the ocean bottle. Do they feel their heart rate slow? Do their breaths get deeper? What else do they notice?
11) Play Emotional Charades
This is a fun and non-stressful way to role-play emotions.
To play, take turns acting out a feeling and seeing if others can guess it. Eliminating sounds and only focusing on identifying feelings through physical movements and gestures encourages your child to link their body and their emotions.
12) Practice Mindfulness Activities for Emotional Balance
Once your child learns how to name their emotions, how do they create an internal environment that helps them thoughtfully choose their actions and reactions? One great way is to practice mindfulness.
Mindfulness is about being aware of your feelings, your thoughts, and the sensory inputs affecting you right now. You can also think of it as taking a kind and honest look at what you’re experiencing in the present.
Keep things simple as you begin to practice mindfulness with your child. Try thirty seconds of meditation or sitting for fifteen minutes drawing together.
13) Color-Code Emotions
A popular emotional regulation tool in schools is Zones of Regulation, which makes emotions more concrete for students by connecting them with colors:
- The RED zone: an extremely high level of emotion like terrified, enraged, or wildly excited
- The YELLOW zone: a heightened level of emotion like nervous, frustrated, antsy, or feeling silly
- The GREEN zone: a calm state like content, focused, and in a space where they can interact with other people and are able to learn
- The BLUE zone: a low level of emotional affect like fatigue or boredom
In a classroom, this tool creates a sort of shorthand language for kids to use as they navigate their day.
They might tell their teacher, “I feel like I’m in the red zone” and get some reminders about what they can do to move into yellow or green. They might spot a friend heading into the red zone and try to help them calm down.
Implementing this tool helps kids normalize the processes of emotional regulation and de-escalation, and you can use it at home as well.
14) Make and Use a Mood Meter
Continue with the idea of color-coding emotions by creating a mood meter. This is a concrete tool that facilitates a more nuanced conversation about emotions, replacing a generic word like “good” with specific ones, such as “curious,” “excited,” or “at peace.”
A mood meter is divided into four different colored quadrants:
- Red quadrant (upper left) = mad
- Yellow quadrant (upper right) = happy
- Blue quadrant (lower left) = sad
- Green quadrant (lower right) = calm
You can start using the mood meter by asking your child to indicate which quadrant describes how they feel.
Once they get the hang of that, you can help them become more specific in defining their mood by creating a horizontal axis representing their energy level and a vertical axis representing how much they enjoy how they feel.
Number 5 points on the horizontal (energy) axis, beginning with 0 at the bottom of each quadrant and ending with 5 at the top. Do the same on the horizontal (pleasantness) axis, beginning with 0 on the far left of each quadrant and ending with 5 on the far right.
Then ask them to get more specific when they name what they’re feeling. For example, if they’re scared, they may categorize the feeling as sad, with a high energy number of 5 and a low enjoyability number of 1. This teaches your child to really hone in on what they’re feeling.
The more accurately your child can describe their feelings, the closer they come to truly understanding themselves. It’s this kind of knowing that creates a sense of comfort and stability, as well as a pathway back to a calm place when they begin to dysregulate.
Emotional Self-Regulation with Begin
Learning how to regulate emotions takes repetition and practice. Be patient. Try to help your child through each step with empathy. It can be tough!
At Begin, we make tools to help.
Our Learn with Sesame Street program, created together with Sesame Workshop, helps kids practice essential social and emotional skills, including emotional regulation. With the help of their Sesame Street friends, kids explore feelings, identify emotions, and more!
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the five RULER skills that help build emotional intelligence in children?
Designed and tested by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, the RULER model is an approach for understanding five emotional skills.
- Recognize: identify how someone (or yourself) feels by body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice
- Understand: determine why someone (including you) feels something (i.e.: what happened?)
- Label: naming an emotion with specific language (not just “mad,” for example, but “furious”)
- Express: share feelings appropriately
- Regulate: use techniques like slow breathing and taking a walk to regulate your emotions
Understanding the RULER model can sometimes help your child grow their emotional intelligence.
What’s the difference between emotional regulation and self-regulation?
Emotional regulation is an internal experience (“I feel happy”), accompanied by a purposeful outward expression of that emotion (smiling). It’s a subset of self-regulation.
Self-regulation encompasses a broader skill set, covering overall behaviors, attention, and thoughts. It can look like controlling impulsive physical actions, staying on task, and focusing.
How can I support my child while they’re having a temper tantrum?
Supporting your child when they’re having a temper tantrum isn’t easy. (And it isn’t fun!) But there are steps you can take to help it more effectively and quickly.
First, try to stay calm. No matter how loud or how wiggly your child gets, the more you can regulate your own feelings, the better. See if you can take advantage of a break in the tantrum (if there is one!) to validate your child’s feelings. That kind of recognition is comforting.
When you determine your child has settled enough to try some emotional regulation techniques, give them some ideas, like the ones we’ve listed above.
Supporting your child when they’re in this high-energy state requires lots of patience, as well as a belief that they’ll come through it to the other side. (They will!)
