Co-regulation and why that’s hard

You love your kids and want them to be ok, be able to manage their emotions and to be happy functional humans. Managing your emotions first is likely the most powerfully helpful tool to realize your important goal. Watch the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTRi0nmVuDs&list=PPSV

Parents come to me with this request all the time. They are spot on. The world is a complicated place that is filled with opportunities for great joy and connection and also for frustration, anxiety and grief. All people engaged in life will experience the full range of emotions. We are build for it. The ability to reflect, process, self regulate and cope with challenging emotions; in healthy and connected ways; is the ultimate goal. For ourselves and for our kids.

Parents can be their children’s most valuable and powerful guide in this process

Navigating what the world throws at you is no small undertaking and requires skill. And yes, there are many tools that can be directly taught. Breathing exercises, mindfulness and distress tolerance and the like, are widely accessible and have great usefulness.

Knowing these is a fantastic first step. I teach these on a daily basis and encourage kids to practice them outside of those moments when they need them. I make the analogy of how we practice fire drills at school, (when there is no danger,) so that if they need to follow those plans in an emergency, they already know automatically what to do. In such moments we are not designed to do high level decision making.

Imagine for a sec that you are feeling extremely angry or worried about something and someone tells you to ‘just do your breathing exercise.’ Just writing that makes me cringe. Yet adults say these things to kids and are genuinely surprised when they struggled to use their tools. (and maybe growl at us too)

Learning skills is the first step. Growing the ability to use them when needed takes time, practice, support and even maturity.

Parents are GOLD in helping kids develop their emotional regulation tool kit- just not always in the way that we imagine. Telling kids to ‘use their tools’ is vastly less powerful then DOING the work of emotional regulation with your kids.

Being emotionally regulated > telling others to do it (while you are not)

Simple but not easy

Co-regulation is it.

And it is ridiculously challenging because to co-regulate, you first have to be regulated yourself. When your child is having a big emotion (or their behavior is activating some deep fear button within you) this is no small undertaking.

We adults are in a challenging place because many of us did not REALLY learn these skills as children and they were not necessarily practiced in our families. Instead parenting was more likely to involve fear, shame, unquestioned authority and/or brushing things under the rug. The adults around us may not have been terribly skilled themselves at self awareness, emotional intelligence, healthy communication, repair, etc. We see the importance of these skills for our kids and teens while many of us are also working on them ourselves.

We are flying the plane while building it

I know I am and this is just fine. Holding the awareness that you will miss the mark builds opportunities to model apologizing, healthy communication and making amends to, and also in front of, your children. This is cycle breaking work that, by definition, demands sustained and uncomfortable effort.

It is worth it beyond measure.

You might not be regulated if…

• You are giving advice: Not to say that all advice is unwanted or unhelpful. Yet it can also easily come from a place of ones own anxiety. Advice can come later; preferably if the person is asking AND co-regulation feels steady AND there is information you still need to pass along to your child.
• Problem solving: Similar to advice giving in that it may be wanted or needed but can easily come from a place of anxiety that may look like an overly powerfully drive to be helpful or fix the problem. Can also take away a person’s confidence in their own ability, self determination and problem solving.

Both can lead to ‘yes, buts’ which are excellent clues that what you are offering is not what is needed or wanted in the moment.

Eliciting their own thinking and ideas is a better place to start.

• Resist the impulse to tell your child some version of ‘do your breathing exercises.’ (especially when you are feeling anxious yourself) Consciously slow and make deliberate your own breathing. Double benefit of helping to calm your nervous system while also cuing the child’s nervous system that you are safe and steady (and also to breathe.)
• Lecturing is similar to problem solving and advise giving. It is too many words and too much information. Delivered from a place of wanting to be helpful though not well timed or well received.
• Yelling– this one is pretty obvious that we’ve lost the thread

• Big expressions of our own emotions- this is tricky because parents are also human and therefore also have emotional responses and reactions. Especially as it relates to our children who we love in an extra raw sort of way. Their big emotions can be extremely ‘contagious’ particularly when we are also worried about them in the moment or in the future. Self regulation is again key here.
• Shaming– Be wary too about expressions that may be felt as shaming by your child. ‘You are making me so sad’ or ‘well I guess I’m just the worst parent ever’ or ‘everything I say is wrong,’ and statements along these lines. These risk shifting the dynamic to one where the child must abandon their feeling to make the parent feel better and do not contribute to healthy communication.

The YouTube video linked above goes into detail and a role play of co-regulation.