By Gill Means, Participation and Lived Experience Manager
Being a parent can be an incredibly rewarding experience. But it can also be challenging. When we're focused on nurturing and supporting our children, we can overlook the importance of our own mental health as parents. But the two are very much intertwined. And that's where co-regulation comes into it.
What is co-regulation?
Put simply, co-regulation means responding to someone else’s emotional state. When a child is experiencing big emotions - for example, frustration, anger, what we used to call a 'meltdown' - the parent or carer can help by remaining calm themselves and through this calmness, help the child to come down from their heightened emotional state.
It’s easier said than done. In the heat of the moment, it's not always easy to stay calm, especially if it's not something we have practiced much before. We can get caught up in the child's big emotions which can lead to us feeling that emotion too, whether that's anger, frustration or a mixture of the two. Parent and child can both calm down, or parent and child can both become agitated and stressed.
Co-regulation works both ways. It's not just the child's emotions that influence the parent. If the parent is feeling stressed or angry, the child can pick up on this and adopt the same emotional state. So it's important for parents to understand that their emotional states can and do impact their children.
How can co-regulation help us as parents and children?
Learning to regulate our emotions can help our parenting, help ourselves and our children. It can help us to:
1. Feel better ourselves.
2. Help our children to feel better.
We’ve probably all been there, watching a child make a scene in the supermarket or we've been the parent or carer of a child in this state. The parent gets more and more stressed until both parent and child are really struggling. At this point, ideally the parent could take a moment, a deep breath, try to calm their nervous system. They could tell themselves that they and their child are ok, and through this, hopefully bring the child back down from their heightened emotional state.
How to practice co-regulation?
1. Breathe. When we get stressed or upset (dysregulated) it’s not just something that happens in the brain. Our physical bodies are affected too as our heartbeat speeds up, our muscles tense and our breathing becomes shallow. Taking deep breaths tells us we are safe and brings us back down.
2. Repeat some simple lines to yourself. Saying simple statements to ourselves like, "They’re just a child and they’re behaving like a child’; “It doesn’t matter what other people think”; “We're safe,” can help bring us back into the moment and stop emotions spiralling.
Practising these techniques makes it easier to remember in the moment, but regulating ourselves in stressful moments is a skill that takes practice. Sometime snapping or being short tempered is normal. It’s okay and doesn’t mean you have failed.
Rupture and repair
Another helpful framework is the concept of rupture and repair, which recognizes that we all get things wrong at times.
When you feel you have reacted to your child or their emotions rather than co-regulating, it’s worth acknowledging this and putting it into words for your child. "I lost my temper there, I'm sorry." It’s a good lesson to show our children that no one is expected to be perfect, we all make mistakes at times and we can take action to make things right. We are all human and it’s ok to get things wrong.
Modelling
Children are always watching us and they will notice what we do, not just what we say. Behaviour matters a lot and our actions can undermine or reinforce our actions.
Every family looks different and while these coregulation techniques are something that everyone can apply, it’s important to remember that some of us face more demands and challenges than others.
People who have experienced trauma or those who have never seen coregulation modelled for them are likely to find it more challenging. Likewise, parents whose children have additional needs may find it more demanding. We all face different levels of pressures and stress and we have different levels of skills and abilities. But if people can understand the concept of co-regulation, it is simple to apply and with practice, can be a great tool to support ourselves and our children.
Our Small Talk, Big Change podcast explores critical issues impacting the mental health of children, young people and families.
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