Written by, Nicole Fuglsang MA, LPC, NCC CEO, Calo Programs
When raising emotionally healthy children who can handle life’s challenges and regulate their emotional states, co-regulation is an essential part of parenting. You can’t shelter your child from tough situations, so using effective co-regulation techniques helps calm them during overwhelming stress. It also models effective self-regulation tactics they can internalize and utilize as they mature from children to adults.
Co-regulation techniques can also help children learn new skills through hands-on activities, such as learning to regulate their emotions and behavior in a safe and supportive environment, allowing them to manage their strong feelings and stressors in life. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the most important ways parents can co-regulate with their teen or child, and when further treatment may be necessary.
Table of Contents
What Is Co-Regulation?
Co-regulation is a process in which you connect with your child and provide a calming presence that helps them manage their emotions and behaviors, especially in times of stress. Effective co-regulation techniques may involve anything from rocking a crying young child until they settle down to breathing calmly beside a distressed teenager until they mirror your behavior and can regulate themselves.
The Importance of Co-Regulation
Co-regulation is a healthy developmental process that helps your child integrate all emotions and situations, including those that bring distress. As a parent, you can play a key part in this process using techniques such as emotional regulation and intelligence. Co-regulation, an emotional state in which children can safely learn from adults what it means to regulate their emotions, is essential for a child’s development into adulthood. The parent or caregiver serves as a secure base or safe foundation for children to learn how to be in a healthy relationship.
Co-regulation is not a steady state. Children will move through the normal ups and downs of relationships, and frequently, as they encounter new experiences or re-experience some aspect of their previous traumatic history, they will need support to co-regulate. The parent or caregivers’ ability to pay close attention and attune with their child is the lever for co-regulation. Parents and/or caregivers must be fully committed to and accepting of the child while providing safety for co-regulation.
Reading the Five Indicators of Co-Regulation
It’s important for parents to know how to read the five indicators of co-regulation in teens and children so that they can effectively support them in their emotional development. These indicators include emotional cues, physical cues, cognitive cues, behavioral cues, and social cues. Understanding these signs can help parents respond appropriately to help their child or teen regulate their emotions and navigate challenging situations.
Here are some of the indicators parents should look out for when they are trying to co-regulate with their child:
- Eye contact
- Safe touch
- Proximity
- Congruence of effect
- Receptivity to empathy
Co-Regulation and Child Development
Children with secure attachment styles feel supported by and connected with their parents, allowing them to confidently express their emotions and feel secure as they move into adult relationships.
Insecure attachment styles, however, are characterized by fear, uncertainty, and lack of trust in relationships and may lead to reactive attachment disorder in which a child shows frequent symptoms of anger, disobedience, or passive aggression. So, providing consistent and reliable connections early in a child’s development helps them develop healthy self-regulation skills, which leads to more secure attachment styles.
Co-Regulation and the Nervous System
The automatic nervous system is made up of two parts: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or faint response during moments of danger and overwhelming stress. It speeds up a child’s heart rate, increases their breathing rate, and keeps them on high alert. This response allows them to function while their bodies are in danger or when they’re straining themself by engaging in physically stressful activities, like exercising.
Meanwhile, the parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for restoring the body to a calm state following periods of stress or danger. It slows a child’s breathing and heart rate, undoing the automatic nervous system’s work.
While the two nervous systems ideally balance each other out, children, including teens experiencing heightened anxiety, often need a parent to co-regulate with them and help activate their parasympathetic system. By co-regulating the nervous system with a child, a parent essentially functions as an external nervous system, promoting calm behavior, reducing high-stress levels, and enabling their child to access higher brain functions for better social engagement.
Co-Regulation and Mental Health
Co-regulation promotes good mental health in children. By serving as a role model and reinforcing self-regulation techniques, a parent shows their child how to be more resilient during life’s challenges. This is particularly useful for those with autism, developmental and/or complex trauma.
- Healthy Development: Coregulation is the process through which children develop the ability to soothe and manage distressing emotions and sensations from the beginning of life through connection with nurturing and reliable primary caregivers. Through the interpersonal process of co-regulation, parents can significantly impact the emotional well-being of their children by providing a sense of security, support, and shared understanding.
- Trauma: Childhood trauma can cause children to struggle with self-regulating their emotions, which adversely affects their physical, mental, and emotional health. To learn effective self-soothing techniques, they must first co-regulate with trusted figures, such as parents and therapists. This provides them with a needed sense of stability.
- Autism: Children with autism require secure connections with others to provide stability and emotional support, which can improve their overall well-being. For example, an article published in the Journal of Autism Developmental Disorders showed that co-regulation may help children with autism to reduce symptoms of anger or emotional activation.
Co Regulation vs. Self-Regulation
Coregulation uses external support and connection to help children and teens to manage their emotions effectively. On the other hand, self-regulation involves a teen’s ability to control their own emotions independently.
For teens struggling with self-regulation due to trauma or autism, co-regulation acts as a foundation upon which they can learn to soothe themselves and navigate life’s challenges. The skill set of self-regulation is developed through interactions with others, with caregivers providing support for kids to develop co-regulation during their formative years of life and eventually self-regulation.
Techniques to Co-Regulate With Your Child
Developing good co-regulation strategies allows you to help your child or teen in various situations. It’s also important that you experience co-regulation with healthy peers and your spouse or partner. But before you can co-regulate, you must know how to manage/regulate your own emotions, which is why many of the co-regulation techniques below focus on your ability to emotionally self-regulate.
1. Create a safe space to connect
Creating a safe space for co-regulation means establishing an environment where you and your child feel comfortable expressing and sharing feelings. This can be a physical space established at home or a calm moment you create during difficult situations.
To form this safe space, start by regulating your own emotions. If you’re in a heightened emotional state, you’ll have a harder time co-regulating. Practicing self-regulation techniques like mindfulness and identifying emotions you’re experiencing puts you in the proper state of mind to empathize and attune with your child.
2. Label emotions and feelings
While most people are familiar with broad emotions like anger or sadness, many still miss the subtler feelings that come with big emotions, such as shame, grief, frustration, and vulnerability. Learning to recognize and become comfortable sharing these emotions is an important co-regulation technique that can help teens and parents learn how to regulate and work through emotions.
3. Use emotional modeling
Emotional modeling is about naming your own emotions and sharing how they can affect your relationships. This might mean talking about your anger with others and reflecting on how the emotion comes from frustrations at work.
By modeling this behavior and being vulnerable about your emotional state, you can have open conversations about emotions. You can also show your child how to be curious rather than judgmental about how they’re feeling, leading to healthier self-regulatory behaviors.
4. Practice deep breathing
Deep breathing is an effective co-regulation technique that taps into your parasympathetic nervous system, enabling you to slow down and look inward. This rhythmic activity helps keep you in an already emotionally regulated state.
Deep breathing can be tough for someone feeling emotionally dysregulated because heightened emotions lead to shallow breaths, thanks to signals from the sympathetic nervous system.
So, be patient when practicing deep breathing with your child when they’re dysregulated. While you can gradually get them to reflect this behavior until they become regulated, it may take some time.
5. Seek therapy for help with co-regulation
If your child is struggling with regulating their emotions, and your co-regulation techniques don’t seem effective, it’s time to seek therapy for help with co-regulation. Your child may need assistance because issues like family fighting, difficulty at school, or depression are slowing or preventing progress. In these cases, a therapist can co-regulate with them and help you with your own co-regulation techniques. For example, creative art therapies that use visual art, movement, and music could benefit your child since creativity can help regulate emotions.
In addition, be mindful of self-care. If overwhelming stress or mental health challenges are interfering with your ability to self- and co-regulate, contact us and we’ll help you find a healing treatment option.
Co-Regulation and the Road to Self-Regulation
By practicing co-regulation techniques, including creating a safe space to identify and talk about emotions, you can help your child learn how to first coregulate with you and then move to self-regulation and resiliency. Remember, co-regulation is key for healthy relational development. For co-regulation to lead to healthy self-regulation, there must be consistent, repetitive, reliable experiences of safe relationships, preventing the development of dysregulation and maladaptive coping strategies.
If your teen is struggling with regulating their emotions or other mental health conditions related to trauma or autism, Calo is here for you. We specialize in helping teens who are struggling and can work with your family to find a healing treatment option. Call us at 573-745-5662 or contact us today to heal.
