How to expand your child’s emotional resilience

Repeatedly experiencing the sensation of “just right” will help your child live a fuller, more wholehearted life

Emotional regulation is a skill our kids need to learn to have more resilience. It means your child is not over-activated or under-activated, but positively engaged or “just right.”

When your child is regulated, they’re interested and curious, not anxious, obsessed, or withdrawn. Their body posture is assertive, not aggressive or passive. Their voice sounds pleasant, not too loud or too soft. 

Best of all, when your child is emotionally regulated, it feels good to be around them.

If your child has an eating disorder, anxiety, depression, or other mental health condition, they’re probably spending more time feeling emotionally dysregulated than regulated. Helping your child build emotional regulation skills is key to supporting your child’s mental health. 

We are the most important influences on our child’s ability to self-regulate; nobody is better positioned to teach them this skill than you. 

It’s a lot of pressure, but also a tremendous opportunity! 

The science of emotional regulation is called neurobiology, which is the biology of the nervous system. The nervous system is incredibly complex and influences almost everything we think and do, often without conscious awareness.

We used to think human behavior was rational, driven by the mind and logical choices. But we’ve learned that most behavior begins in our nervous system, which constantly scans the environment for threats and motivates the fight, flight, or freeze response. Nervous system dysregulation triggers most human behavior, particularly the ones we find hard to comprehend like eating disorders.

The breakthroughs we’ve made in neurobiology are largely thanks to the invention of the functional MRI (fMRI) technique in 1990, which facilitated a startling amount of progress in understanding our brains and nervous systems. It’s still a developing field but it’s already transformed everything about how we view disordered behaviors.

These scientific advances finally put to rest the idea that eating disorders are a choice. With a greater understanding of neurobiology, we understand that most eating disorder behaviors are driven unconsciously by nervous system dysregulation. 

With the science of neurobiology to guide us, parents can respond more effectively when eating disorder behaviors and other symptoms of dysregulation show up. 

We do this by soothing the unconscious nervous system rather than addressing the rational brain with logic and explanations. This is called co-regulation. Rather than telling your child what to do when they’re using disordered behavior, you view behavior as a form of communication and help your child feel safer and therefore less driven to use disordered behavior.

Over time, the practice of co-regulating with your child’s anxious nervous system, combined with therapy and nutritional treatment, will help your child heal. Emotional regulation is often the crucial missing piece when eating disorder treatment stalls.

Here are the benefits of having better emotional regulation skills:

• More balanced and calm state of mind

• Able to cope with worry, negative thoughts, and difficult emotions

• Greater self-awareness

• Able to think more clearly and make better decisions

• Greater emotional balance

• Able to respond rather than react in stressful situations

• More fulfilling relationships

• Greater self-acceptance and self-compassion

• Able to eat healthy, filling meals to sustain mental and physical health

• Less embarrassment and shame

Another big benefit of having a child with self-regulation skills is that parenting them is easier! While it may take a little time to get the hang of it, when you learn the secret of co-regulating with your child and start practicing it with them, everything starts to fall into place.

We have so much influence over how our kids feel, and we can all unlock this influence and start making a positive difference in kids’ nutrition, mental and physical health, and the sacred relationship between food and body. Let me know if you’d like some help supporting your child’s emotional regulation.

Ginny Jones Parent Coach / More-Love.org

Coaching Notes 

Here are some stories from the last few weeks of my coaching sessions with parents who have kids with eating and body image issues:

• My clients explored their feelings about their daughter’s weight gain and recognized that they need to work on their beliefs and attitudes towards weight and food to support her recovery.

• Another client realized that her child needs a different type of support at meals. This mom has been talking a lot about nutritional needs, but in fact, her son needs space to explore his feelings about eating and food. His highly-sensitive nervous system has strong aversions, and he needs her support in labeling them and processing them in ways that don’t interfere with eating. 

• I helped my client open a conversation with his child about divorce and change. His child’s eating disorder symptoms are increasing as he moves into a new romantic relationship, so he needs to talk about the changes to help his child practice resilience.

Expand your child’s emotional resilience by co-regulating

You want to help your child make good choices and listen to your good advice. But your child can’t listen to you when their nervous system is dysregulated. In fact, the more we tell a child what to do when they’re dysregulated, the less they can hear us. 

You want to raise a happy, healthy kid who can roll with the punches and tolerate change and frustration without acting out with disordered behaviors. To do that, you need to co-regulate with them when they’re upset so they can repeatedly experience what it’s like to feel calm and regulated in the face of stress and discomfort. 

The first step in building your child’s emotional regulation skills is to recognize the state they’re in. Your awareness and attunement to their dysregulation is essential to recognizing that they aren’t making conscious choices as much as being driven to use behaviors as a form of communication. Once you realize this, you can respond to their emotional needs rather than co-dysregulating. 

I’ve created a 7-page printable guide and workbook based on personal practice and my 1:1 coaching work with more than 120 families to help you navigate emotional dysregulation with your child. It includes information about emotional regulation and the five steps you can take to co-regulate with your child.

Paid Subscribers: Click the button below to get your printable and start parenting with more confidence today.