Why children are the masters of emotional regulation

Isn’t it a bizarre fact that the children who yell, scream, cry and express themselves ‘too much’ are the ones we call ‘emotionally dysregulated’?

We should be calling those children ‘currently regulating’.

They’re the ones doing the thing that when we become adults, we call ‘doing the work’. They’re the ones we should be watching and emulating. They have it right. But there comes a time in a child’s life after we have soothed, and rewarded, and distracted and intervened, when they realise, “oh, I’m not meant to be making all this noise. I’m meant to be keeping it all in”.

And then not too long after they start to feel like a big kid, now that they don’t get as upset about the little things. This leads to feeling in control and well-behaved, and comes with the stamp of approval from the adults in their life. But over time, they start to experience a niggling feeling, a tiredness, an unknown pressure and they don’t know why.

By adulthood, they’re stumped.

Why the heaviness? They talk to their friends about it, try to cognitively work it all out, rationalise away their emotions. They’re stumped. Exhausted. Dreaming back to the time in their life where they felt free and light, but never quite remembering the feeling.

All the while, trying to calm their own children down so they aren’t being ‘too out of control’ with their emotions, completely unaware that the kids are the ones with the answers. Looking around at everyone else doing the same, they realise this is ‘normal’ and they just get on with life, and try and distract themselves from the pain.

This is me, this is you, this is the mainstream.

How did we forget that the release of emotions (the primal, desperate, raw release of emotions) is the way to free ourselves from a pent up existence? That releasing feelings as they come up is the healthy way. That being in the discomfort of the feeling as it flows is easier than keeping it trapped inside us.

Children are the masters of emotional release. They are the ones doing it right. The biggest support we can be for the ones we call ‘dysreglated’?

Is to shift our expectations. And learn.