Emotional regulation skills for children

Emotional regulation: the preshcooler's ability of managing their emotional skills and behaviors and their ability of making good friendships is a very important thing for them befor getting to school and a very important part of their ability to face the world later and to be successful.

There is even more, those children who have the ability to integration into society are also more successful academically, at the other side, those who are poor of the social skills have strong predictor of academic failure.

We are talking here about getting the children into programs of Social Skills and Problem-Solving Training, which teaches them how to control their emotions, empathy or perspective taking, friendship and communication skills, anger management, interpersonal problem solving, and how to success at school.

These programs had started as small groups treatment programs for children who were diagnosed with oppositional defiant and conduct disorders. but after that the programs has been developed to be used by preschool and elementary teachers as a prevention action designed to increase the social, emotional, and academic competence, and decrease problem behaviors of all children in the classroom.

The ability of regulation emotions is based on the growth of self-regulatory abilities in the early years, but is also affected by the circumstances, affection from other people, and the child's goals for emotional regulation in every single position.

For most children, growing up in supporting families, the emotional regulation is completly linked with enhanced psychosocial well-being and the social emotions and competence.

But for children who are at risk for the development of psychopathology according to stressing circumstances in their environment, emotional regulation often includes inherent trade-offs that make nonoptimal strategics of managing emotion expectable, but, in a context of difficult environmental demands and conflicting emotional goals, there is no other way.

There are many circumstances that effect the emotional regulation in children such as living with a parent who is depressed, or being a witness or experience domestic violence, or even are temperamentally inhibited when encountering novel challenges.

In each case, the child's efforts to manage emotion will come against certain stresses while he is still enhancing the child's vulnerability to other risks and demands.

This double-edged sword of emotional regulation in conditions of risk for children cautions against using “optimal” emotional regulation as an evaluative standard for such children or assuming that emotional regulation necessarily improves psychosocial well-being.

It also suggests how the study of emotional regulation must consider the goals for regulating emotion and the contexts in which those goals are put.