If you are dealing with little kiddies with temper tantrums, if you’re trying to navigate sleep with your little one, if you are thinking about picky eating, this is an episode that you do not want to miss. Today we’re going to be chatting with Tove Gant, and she is going to be interviewing me on the subject of self-regulation. And it is quite a thorny issue in that there’s quite polarized views on it, like many parenting views, around how much responsibility for self-regulating we should be giving to our little ones, and how much we should just be making their so pleasant that they never have to learn to self-regulate.
So today we’re going to unpack this concept of self-regulation. We’re going to talk about what it is, and then we’re going to talk about some really practical tools that you can use to help your little one self-regulate on a physiological level, on a sensory level, on an emotional level, and on a behavioral level. So join me and Tove as we explore this amazing topic.
Welcome to Sense by Meg Fora, the podcast that’s brought to you by ParentSense, the app that takes guesswork out of parenting. If you’re a new parent, then you are in good company. Your host, Meg Fora, is a well-known OT, infant specialist, and the author of eight parenting books.
Each week, we’re going to spend time with new mums and dads, just like you, to chat about the week’s wins, the challenges, and the questions of the moment. Subscribe to the podcast, download the ParentSense app, and catch Meg here every week to make the most of that first year of your little one’s life. And now, meet your host.
Welcome back, mums and dads. Great to have you with us. It is Sense by Meg Fora, and I am Meg Fora.
And this episode today is one of my favorites because I get to have Tove with me, who is a regular on our podcast who interviews me and asks me all the questions that she thinks you would want to hear if I was speaking about a subject matter that I was reasonably an expert in. And today, I think this is one of my most passionate topics. It’s the topic of self-regulation.
It’s also a highly contentious topic. So I’m really, really excited that tonight, and Tove will be having a look at this with us. So welcome, Tove.
Thanks, Meg. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I mean, I love this topic with three kids and one with additional needs.
Self-regulation is a massive part of our journey and very much an ongoing part, particularly for Grey, our daughter, who’s got additional needs, is teaching our kids the skills to kind of regulate themselves and understand their emotions. And so to kick it off, I guess, what is self-regulation and why is it crucial for development? Yeah, so it really is, I think, one of the most important aspects of child development. And, you know, if you look at child development, the obvious ones are things like, when is my baby going to talk? When is my baby going to walk? And those things are super obvious.
If I said to you, you know, you may have a special needs child who’s not going to walk, you would be thinking about what your life is going to look like, having to carry a 15 kilogram child around, you know, semi-adult around. And so those things are very obvious to us, that we know that those areas of development need to be developed. But a lot of people don’t really understand the significance and the absolutely critical importance of self-regulation.
So in answer to your question about what it is, self-regulation is the ability of any being, and this is any living thing, an amoeba actually self-regulates, if you can believe it. Yeah, they, I mean, they don’t think it through and it’s happening at a very basic level. But everything in the world self-regulates.
And if I give you an example of a lizard, when things get really chilly and cold, a lizard moves himself onto a rock and absorbs heat. And if he doesn’t do that, he’s not going to be able to go and catch his prey and he’s not going to be able to survive because he needs that heat. He’s cold-blooded.
Now that is a very rudimentary form of self-regulation and it’s what we call physiological regulation. And other creatures would do it through a process of osmosis maybe. You know, it happens at a very, very basic, basic level.
But for human beings, kind of being at the top of the pyramid, we do a much more advanced level of self-regulation. We don’t just regulate our body temperature, our heart rate, but we self-regulate absolutely every aspect of ourselves, our being, our behavior, our thoughts. We’re self-regulating all the time.
And when self-regulation is good, it means that we won’t throw temper tantrums. We’ll be able to understand what another person’s feeling and regulate our emotions and our behavior in relation to how they’re feeling. And that’s a very high level of self-regulation.
And we have to be able to do it to survive. There is no way that a human being who is functional in the world gets by without self-regulating. So self-regulation is absolutely foundational.
What’s interesting about it is it actually happens on a trajectory and it develops through life. So it starts really, really early on, actually like 34 weeks gestation, and then it develops all the way through life. So it’s developmental, it’s a developmental skill, it’s absolutely essential to our survival.
And actually more than that, it codes for how successful we’re going to be in life because the better we can self-regulate, the better we’re going to be able to succeed. So with that being said, what role do parents play in the process of teaching? Because I’m assuming the skill of self-regulation, the way you’ve spoken about it, isn’t a skill that has to be learned. There’s got to be methods that we use to self-regulate.
So what role as parents do we play, I guess, in the early years to help our kiddies self-regulate? So every single milestone that develops, develops in the context of a relationship. And I’ll take something really basic like walking. Obviously, if a little one is going to walk, the role that a parent has to play is give them the exposure needed to be able to walk.
And there was research done in the middle of the 1900s where they found little ones who’d been left in a Romanian orphanage, and the orphanage kiddies, and they had never been taken out of their cots and they couldn’t walk. And it’s fairly obvious to us, if we’re not exposed to being on the ground, if we’re not exposed to the opportunity to walk, we’re not going to learn to walk. And so good parenting, which almost all of us will do, would allow our little ones the opportunity to play on the floor sufficiently so that they will actually learn to walk.
And we will put a chair close to a table so that they can walk from the chair to the coffee table, and cruise, as we call it, before they learn to walk. And eventually we’ll move that chair a little bit further away, and then they’ll take that one step from the chair to the table without actually holding onto anything or between two parents. And that’s the way that we facilitate the skill of walking.
So you can see the role that a parent plays there is that we’re almost challenging our little one, pushing them just outside of their comfort zone and giving them the opportunity to learn to walk. Now, self-regulation is just the same. In fact, maybe it’s even more so because self-regulation happens in the context of a relationship.
So parents play a really, really important role. Now, in the beginning stages, just like you have to carry your baby everywhere before they learn to walk, in the early days, we have to do all the regulation for our little ones. So we actually regulate for them.
So when our little three-week-old is crying, we pick them up, we cuddle them, we wrap them a little tighter, we give them a feed, we rock them, we soothe them, we sing to them, and they settle down and they start to, you know, they calm. And so calming, which is a form of self-regulation of emotion, is actually entirely the responsibility of the parents in the early day. So the first role that we play as a parent is that we take it on.
We actually regulate for our little ones. So we regulate their temperature by wrapping them warmly enough. We regulate their sensory space by not letting them become overstimulated.
We regulate their emotions so that when they’re having a little temper tantrum about not being able to use the TV remote when we’ve taken it away from them, we help them to calm down. So we do a lot of the work for them. And that’s what good, insightful, reflective parents do.
But at some point in that journey, we all recognize that we’ve got to start passing some of this responsibility onto our little one. And so they will eventually be able to self-regulate themselves. Now, it doesn’t happen overnight.
It’s not like a switch that you flick and then, oh, today I was regulating for them, tomorrow they’re self-regulating. It is a dance, I like to call it. And it is a period that we call co-regulation, where I’m doing some of the work and I’m handing some of the work over to you.
And that is the role of a parent. And it’s quite a tricky thing because we don’t really always know how much we should be doing and how much we can actually pass on to our little ones. And it’s that understanding of how much is my little one ready to take themselves? How do I facilitate them taking on some responsibility? And how do I challenge them enough that they’re actually starting to take a bit of the responsibility themselves? That’s the responsibility that we take on as parents.
And can I ask, just out of curiosity, how much of the skills or the methods that we use to self-regulate are actually hard-coded into our kiddos and how much of them are because we’ve done it? So if I look at Grey, the only way to calm Grey ever as a baby from the moment she came out of me was to sing or have music. I did exactly the same thing with Jagga and Nova and neither of them want to hear me sing or have any music in their space whatsoever. And so for me, it was the same skill I use, but it didn’t land with all three of my kids.
And so for me, that was really interesting. I had to adapt what I did to help co-regulate them because it just wasn’t what worked for them. Yeah, absolutely.
So that’s actually one of the foundational aspects of self-regulation. And there’s so many that we’ve already touched on, one being that it’s developmental, one that it’s relationship-based. But one of the things is that we need to be able to understand what is an extrinsic or an intrinsic factor.
So there are certain intrinsic factors that are hard-coded inside little ones that mean that they might be a better or poorer self-regulator. And then there are extrinsic factors and things that happen in the environment. So let’s unpack those two things.
The intrinsic factors that a child comes to the relationship with and with walking, it would be an example of that would be muscle tone. How good is your muscle tone? Some little ones have higher muscle tone, better muscle tone. So that would be an intrinsic factor that codes for better or sooner or later walking skill as an example.
So self-regulation is just the same. One of those intrinsic factors is their own sensory load and actually their own sensory thresholds. So if you’ve got a little one who’s super sensitive to the world and is just not able to cope with a lot of stimulation, they are likely to be a little bit less well-equipped to self-regulate and you’ve got to work a little harder with them.
And so when they throw a temper tantrum, it’s almighty. When you need to calm them, you’ve got to work a little harder. And so some little ones just come with a certain inbuilt code that says they’re going to be good self-regulators or maybe not as good self-regulators.
And I mean, I lived through that. I’ve also got three kids like you do. And my second child was a phenomenal self-regulator from the get-go.
And so she actually slept through exceptionally early. My other two didn’t sleep through as early. She related to people’s faces much sooner.
She understood people’s emotions much better earlier on. She was that two-year-old that when she was getting fractures, she never threw a temper tantrum. She’d go to her bedroom and she’d sit and read a book to herself, kind of look through a book to herself and then come out 15 minutes later with her doo-doo blankie feeling good.
Whereas you’ll get other little ones who just when their frustrations, they just absolutely completely fall over. So this intrinsic ability to self-regulate varies from one person to the next. And so there is that.
And that’s why sometimes parents look at another parent and go, gosh, I mean, how is it that your child never throws a temper tantrum? Well, if that parent had three kids, like you and I do, they would know that actually it was something that was built into that child. Going to. One of them’s going to.
Exactly. So those are the intrinsic factors. And then the extrinsic factors are the things that happen in the environment that could code for different levels of self-regulation.
So an example of that is if you are in a very, very impoverished, crime-ridden, stressful, toxic stress, terrible relationship with your partner, abusive, your head can go anywhere into those adverse conditions. As a parent, you’re going to be less able to actually co-regulate with your little one. And also your little one is going to be living in a chaotic world, which means that there are extrinsic factors that mean that their ability to self-regulate is a little lower as well.
So, you know, these are the things that these extrinsic and intrinsic factors are the reason why we see very different trajectories for little ones as they learn to navigate self-regulation. And you kind of touched on it, and I guess I’m linking it back to my middle one, Jagger. I find he’s very good at self-regulating at home because when it’s overwhelming or too much, he takes himself down to his bedroom, he sits with his music, his book, he plays with his doo-doo, and he’s fabulous.
Take him out somewhere where the sensory environment isn’t overwhelmed for him, like the beach, where there’s a lot of sand and there’s a lot of noise and people are telling him what to do. That’s his struggle with sensory processing then triggers, you know, so I always say, well, he’s quite a good regulator, but he’s actually only a good regulator when he’s at home in an environment that he knows how to take himself out of. So I guess what is that relationship between self-regulation and sensory processing? And I guess as parents, what do we do to try and manage that? Yeah, awesome point.
So there’s a thing that we call goodness of fit, which is the fit between our sensory processing ability or actually any aspect of us, but let’s talk about sensory processing because that’s what we’re talking about and the environment. So when you’re at home and things are predictable and things are going your way and you know which room to take you to, you are more able to self-regulate because there’s a goodness of fit between your sensory personality, which is maybe that you’re more sensitive and the environment. And as parents, we do a lot of that.
We actually really cater our children’s environments to their sensory personality and we do it partly consciously, but partly totally subconsciously because it’s what works, you know, that the environment needs to be quieter. I know that about this little one or they need a timeout now, not as a punishment, but as a sensory timeout. And we get to adjust their environment to them.
The tricky thing is, is that real life isn’t necessarily made up of good fit all the time. And so mental flexibility and the ability to be, to self-regulate in an environment that’s challenging is important. And quite interestingly, I had a little one in my practice just actually a couple of weeks ago where the school was saying, you know, this little one has got like some serious conduct disorders at school and he’s aggressive, he hits other children, he screams, he goes, he spins, he does all sorts of things in the school environment.
I saw him in my practice and his parents reported it from home that he was just amazing. He was so together, self-regulating beautifully, but it was because he wasn’t being challenged. And so we kind of need to push our little ones out of their comfort zone, but at the same time, have a goodness of fit in the other environments.
So what does that look like practically? It means that if you’ve got a more sensitive one, like let’s say your middle child, you’ve got to go to a birthday party and you’re going to decrease the amount of time you might stay there. You’re going to watch for when is he starting to become overstimulated? You’re going to watch for the social setting where too much is going on. You know, maybe you wouldn’t even take him to a birthday party at the spur.
You’ll rather just say, look, that’s one that we’re just going to miss because it just, it just isn’t worth the trauma. So you’re going to cater what he can, you know, his environment to what he can manage so that you can kind of really get this ideal environment for him to be successful at self-regulating. But parallel with that, the world isn’t always like that.
So you also have to push them out. So where do you push? Yeah, so you do it and in OT, we call it grading. So you start to push them a little bit out of their comfort zone little by little.
And so it might be that he doesn’t do if there’s a birthday party at the spur, he’s not going to go there for the two hours. You’re just going to say, I’m going to pop in for 15 minutes. And then he has a really successful time because he just doesn’t get overstimulated.
He manages it well. You head home and that was all positive. And so his experience of that environment is then positive.
He’s self-regulated in the environment because you didn’t push him too far out of his comfort zone. Next time you’re going to go for half an hour and you’re going to see how he copes with that or you’re going to make sure he has a really good sleep before he goes or that he’s well-fed before he goes, because those basic physiological factors like sleep and being rested and having a full tummy and not having a sugar spike. Those things also help our little ones to stay in a well-regulated space.
So, I mean, you’ve literally just gone there. I was going to say, you know, how can parents support the development of self-regulation, particularly when it comes to sleep and feeding? And I think you’ve just touched on how important those are to making sure the kids are successfully regulating. Yeah.
So, I mean, when you’re thinking about supporting them, the first thing that I always say is that you’ve got to develop really high reflective skills. So you’ve got to be watching a little one, watching the environment, watching the goodness of fit between them and the environment and making things as successful for them as possible. So that’s step number one.
And then when they do spin out, going to them, getting down on their level and making eye contact, telling them that they’ve done a really good job and it’s really overwhelming. You can see that they’re overwhelmed and that they’re feeling fractious or whatever words you’re going to use with them and then helping them to soothe themselves. So first step is watching.
Second step is helping them to self-regulate. And then the third thing is actually to give them some frustrations. I mean, as weird as that sounds, you know, if everything always goes your way, you will never learn to self-regulate.
Exactly like the little kitties who were left in their cots. If they weren’t exposed, they would never learn to walk. So particularly with sleep as an example, and sleep’s a great example that you mentioned, you know, we do need to push our little ones out of their comfort zone.
If we are always the one who soothes them all the way to sleep, they will never learn to settle themselves to sleep. Now, the developmental age is where that’s appropriate. So let’s say, for instance, at an eight week old, they’re going to need quite a bit of support to actually fall asleep.
And so that’s, you know, within the normal range. But certainly by the time your little one’s nine months old, you don’t want to be feeding them to sleep because you’re not giving them the opportunity then to learn to actually self-regulate. So it’s kind of knowing how far you want to push them and knowing when to do it that is really important.
And what challenges can parents or my parents face if their child struggles with self-regulation? And what are things? And also, I guess, finding the difference between a toddler being a toddler, like just not getting what they want or being frustrated because you’ve said no or you’re taking them, you know, their lollipop away versus them actually, you know, not managing the environment well. And what can we do to work that as you know, to help them with that? And I guess help ourselves feel a little more empowered. And what can we do to work that to help them with that? And I guess help ourselves feel a little more empowered.
Yeah, so I think it is important to recognize a couple of things. One is that there are developmental, you can call them leaps or stages that little ones will go through where they are going to battle with self-regulation. And toddlers is just, it’s a brilliant example because toddlers really battle to self-regulate.
And it’s exhausting. You know, it has to go there where they throw temper tantrums. And that’s because they’re at this incredible stage of actually learning to manage their very big emotions and to manage their behavior.
So, you know, I think it’s understanding the stage that they’re at would be the first thing. So, you know, when a parent is battling with a little one who throws enormous temper tantrums and, you know, we will, all of us will have one child, you know, that will do that. It’s first of all, you know, just recognizing I’m a good parent.
My little kitty is absolutely fine, but he is going to be that kid that’s going to battle with it. So it’s first of all, kind of almost making allowances for them and cutting yourself some slack. But then, you know, I think the next steps you would want to do is you would really want to try and, you know, give them the words for it to work on their language.
And, you know, that’s one of the things that works really well if you’ve got a little one who really struggles with self-regulation. Because words are that we say that they’re the greatest tool of the mind. And so if you can give your little ones words to use or even signs to use, that goes a long way to helping them cope with it.
And then it is also things like always thinking about the physiological, which I mentioned already. Are they well rested? You know, and so, you know, these are the sort of things that you would be thinking about if you’ve got a little one who is really battling with self-regulation. I’ve actually found, you know, Jagger responds very well to books.
He loves books, loves being read too. And so I’ve bought lots and lots of books on kind of like the Yeti in my tummy, which is like a big emotion books and like don’t hit and Stomposaurus, you know, kids that and trying to read those at night to explain big emotions and reactions in the hope that it lands. I mean, it hasn’t yet.
I’ll let you know if it works. Well, it’s wonderful, you know, a strategy. I always talk about kiddies having a currency.
And one of the things that and I learned this, you know, with my first born, I had to work out what his currency was. All of our kids have got a currency, something, you know, and I think you and I many months ago did the language of love chat where we talked about, you know, the things that really people respond to. But you’ve got to find the thing that your little one needs.
Sometimes it’s just a quiet space with you putting your phone away. That’ll actually help them to self-regulate. Sometimes it’s a book.
Sometimes it’s being completely on their own, in their own space, just on their own. That was what Alex was, you know, she I didn’t need to sit and read her book, but she would just she would just take herself off to her room. And but maybe you don’t have a little one who takes himself off to their room, but maybe you can teach that to them.
And I mean, the fact that Jagger does that means that you’ve probably done that sufficient time that he’s learned that actually I feel a little bit better with these big emotions when I’m on my own. So it’s just trying to find the thing that really lands for them and it helps him to feel, you know, calm and soothed. And sometimes, interestingly, it’s adding in more stimulation.
You know, sometimes they need to go and have a jump. And actually, I’ve seen that with with Gray, with your daughter. Yeah, yeah.
She absolutely has to. Yeah, yeah. That she needs to go.
She needs to get that perception if she can go and do some jumping. She’ll be able to self-regulate. Swinging, bouncing, anything like that.
I think learning your child’s currency is a very important thing and learning the thing that they will for the first of all, feels rewarding for them and second of all, regulates them. And then I guess making sure that you have got access to that. To to that, that whatever that currency is when they are overwhelmed.
So, you know, Jagger can’t go down to his room. Then maybe I need to take his doodoo bunny with him out so that when he is a bit overwhelmed, he can go and sit with his bunny somewhere. Maybe that is enough to kind of regulate him down.
I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of taking things out of the home. Well, I love what you’ve just said, because, you know, I mean, there’s this thing where people talk, you know, you talk about the Linus blanky.
That was one of, I think Snoopy had a friend called Linus and Linus had a blanky that he took everywhere. So we talk about the Linus blanky or the comfort object. And sometimes people say, children can’t take their doodoo blanky out of the home or that must stay in the bed or they mustn’t suck their dummy when they’re not sleeping or whatever it is, you know.
But the reality is that these are little tools and there are almost like transition objects. There are transition between being fully dependent on my mom doing all the self soothing for me and between me managing it completely independently. And in the middle, there’s this transition thing that I can use.
And so, for instance, in PlaySense, which is our play group program, we actually really encourage little ones to bring their doodoo blanky to school because when things go awry at school, which they are going to, having a little doodoo blanky is a fabulous thing. So, you know, finding those things that help a little one to self soothe is really an excellent thing. And, you know, I mean, some kids I’ve seen it quite a bit in the kids that I see in my practice, you know, have earphones that they wear when they’re out and about.
It just helps them to helps to muffle the sounds that would otherwise overwhelm them as they were passing, you know, through from the parking garage to the practice as an example. So it is finding those tools that your little one can use independently that will improve their self-regulation. And can you explain the link between self-regulation and emotional regulation, particularly in the context of a secure attachment to parents? Yeah, so emotional regulation is the ability to regulate my very big emotions and to feel OK with being uncomfortable.
You know, that’s part of what emotional regulation is, is that when I’m feeling discomfort, I’m OK with it, you know, and, you know, it’s something we all actually have to learn, you know. So somebody pulls in front of you in the traffic and you want to like ram them up, you know, the back of their car and you know, scream and shout at them. And emotional regulation is the ability to say, OK, so, you know, maybe that person wasn’t as good a driver as I am.
Maybe he’s having a really bad day, whatever, you know, like you project on and you say, right, give him some context and then you manage to manage your own emotions. So emotional regulation is very, very important. And self-regulation is, you know, self-regulation is just a trajectory from physiological to sensory regulation, to emotional regulation, to behavioral regulation, to cognitive regulation.
That’s kind of the trajectory it takes. So emotional regulation is just a piece of that. Now, in order to emotionally regulate, there’s a couple of things you need.
The one is that you do need to have an attachment to somebody who absolutely adores you, because that’s the basis of a relationship. You know, if you don’t have somebody who loves you, if you don’t feel that connection with them, you’re unlikely to ever be able to project onto a stranger how they might, what they might be going through, you know, because you’re not emotionally connected. So, you know, having a secure attachment, having a parent who adores you and who meets your needs and who is fairly consistent in their caregiving is very, very important as a foundation for emotional regulation.
And it’s all tied up together, secure attachment and emotional regulation. What’s quite interesting, though, and for people who are interested in this, they must go back and listen to episode 123 that we did just a couple of weeks ago with Mark Tomlinson He’s a professor and I actually asked him some really tough questions about self-regulation. So if you are interested, go back and listen to that. But one of the things that he told us about in that episode was the study that was done in the Netherlands where they looked at how quickly a parent responded to a little one and how that related to whether or not they would be securely attached or not.
And out of interest, and for those of us who are psychologists or OT, we know that the secure attachment is actually measured in a little test scenario, a little scenario called the strange situation. And so we can actually measure how securely attached a child is quite interestingly. And in the study, they did this measure of how securely attached children were, but they took these three groups of children and they took a group where the mom responded in the minute, every single second, never, ever didn’t respond, actually maybe even responded before the child actually even squawked because they were so hyper-vigilant around making sure that their child was always in the happiest space possible.
And then the second group of children were the group of children where the parents sometimes got there, sometimes didn’t, and they were kind of, sometimes failed, sometimes they just couldn’t get to them because there was another child in the household. They just didn’t over-respond. They got there as much as they could.
They loved their little ones, but they didn’t do it perfectly. And in the third group were the ones who obviously neglected their children. And they said, well, let’s have a look at these three groups and see who has better emotional regulation and who has better secure attachment.
And what they found was the little ones who actually, where the parents didn’t get to them in the minute every time, and actually sometimes failed and then repaired and then failed and then repaired. Those little kiddies actually were the ones that had the secure attachment, not, as we thought, the ones whose parents responded in the moment every single time. Now, why is that interesting in terms of self-regulation? Well, if you’re always getting there in the minute, you’re never really giving your little one the opportunity to learn to self-regulate because you’re permanently doing it for them.
And those little ones are the little ones that did show some insecure attachment. So it was really interesting. Whereas the little ones where the parents failed a little bit actually were the ones that were securely attached.
Now, I think that’s a very important message for us as parents, because I think that, and I think it’s actually quite a liberating fact because we are all imperfect. Well, most of us are imperfect and we don’t always get there all the time. And we sometimes lose our shit just because we’re having a bad day.
And that’s actually real life. And so when real life happens to little ones, first of all, they are more securely attached, but secondly, their ability to regulate their emotions is a little bit better because they’ve had to take care of themselves. It kind of does a full circle and takes us back to what we were talking about right at the beginning, which is that children need to have the opportunity to learn to self-regulate.
And that happens, and that resilience happens in the context of frustrations. And when I spoke about the lizard at the beginning who went and lay on the rock, well, if he’s living in a terrarium, he never has to do that because it’s always the same temperature. And so we don’t wanna have our kitties brought up in terrariums.
We want our little kitties to have those little frustrations in the context of a loving relationship in which parents repair after they’ve done some damage. So, and I’m not talking about big toxic damage here, I’m talking about just not being perfect. And so this imperfect, beautiful relationship between a parent and a child that is, I’m there for you as much as I can be, but I’m also human, is actually very, very good for both secure attachment and then obviously emotional regulation.
And Meg, in your experience, what are some of the common misconceptions about self-regulating early childhood? So, you know, Terve, a couple of years ago, it was actually probably last year, there was somebody, you know, a mom on social media who had a full-blown rant, actually at me, but in general about, with people who were talking about self-regulation. And she was saying, you know, children shouldn’t have to learn to self-soothe, they shouldn’t be self-regulating. It’s, you know, and we should be there for kitties at every opportunity.
And if we don’t, we’re going to damage them. There’s gonna be, you know, and a lot of the attachment theories or attachment parenting, not attachment theory, attachment parenting goes in that direction. And so I didn’t engage on social media.
I actually DMed her and I said, I’d like to actually talk this through with you. And she wasn’t able to really hear me and probably had her own baggage that she was bringing to the situation. But I think that situation really highlighted for me that parents have a really tough time with this because, you know, there’s so much judgment and so much finger pointing and so much, we send so many strong opinions on how you should parent your child.
I mean, it’s fascinating how other people have opinions about how you should parent your child. And I think this particular misconception around the fact that, you know, everything needs to be perfect for our children. And, you know, there’s this concept of what’s called gentle parenting, which actually is not a bad thing.
It’s just that when it’s taken to the extreme, it’s really not constructive. And those misconceptions around, you know, you must always be there for your child at every opportunity that they must never experience failure, the world has to go their way, that everything has to be happy for them. I think that’s a misconception that really does need to be unpacked.
Because I think that it’s going to cause a lot of problems for little ones. And Kath and I actually did an episode, I think the last episode or two episodes ago on picky eaters. And she said she’s even seeing it with her picky eaters that, you know, they’re never being challenged, everything goes their way.
And so we end up with this epidemic of picky eating. So, you know, I think those sort of misconceptions for me are the ones that in some ways are the hardest for parents because it inflicts guilt on you and you actually don’t know what the right thing to do is. Yeah, and it’s not real, right? No child is going to go into the world and be told they’re perfect and get exactly what they want and study the degree they want and get the job.
Life is full of no’s. And so if you can just teach your child in a safe environment that a no is sometimes okay, you know, and that things are not always going to go their way and they are going to be pushed and that’s just, but in a secure space, I mean, it makes sense. I mean, what would be really interesting is to do an episode on parenting and self-regulating because I definitely think, I didn’t think I had self-regulating problems or sensory issues until I had children.
And now I think I have a load of them, have no skills to deal with them at all because I’m just busy dealing with my kids stuff. Absolutely, yeah. And you know, it’s so interesting that you mentioned that because I think many of us have come, you know, by the time we get to adulthood, we’ve actually worked out how to self-regulate.
We can actually keep our ship afloat. We, you know, we’re quite good. We can go into a work environment.
We tailor our work environment and our space to suit ourselves. And actually we’re pretty much in control. And then along comes a kid.
And, you know, I had an amazing episode that is coming up actually. Actually, it’s going to fly to a little after this. I recorded it this morning.
And the mom I was speaking to is Julia, who’s our regular guest. And she said to me, part of parenting is learning to thrive with the gray. And I thought, wow, yes, that is so profound is that it’s not black and white.
And if you’re looking for a set of rules and if you’re looking for guidelines that you can stick by, and if you’re looking for a routine that’s always going to be perfect. And if you’re looking for a methodology that’s going to be a hundred percent, it’s not like that with parenting. Just when you think that you’ve sorted out your four month old’s routine, they’re going to change it.
You know, just when you think, you know, exactly. Just when you think you’ve got them sleeping through the night, they’ll start waking up again. So thriving in the gray is what it’s all about.
And I guess that speaks to what you mentioned just now, which is resilience and also mental flexibility. The ability to know that, okay, it’s like this today. It’s not perfect and it’ll be better tomorrow.
Right, well, thanks Meg. That was really, really insightful and incredibly helpful. And I have no doubt moms everywhere.
And this, what’s beautiful about this episode is I think it takes you from birth all the way through to toddler four, five. I mean, I’ve got friends who have five-year-olds that are still giving them all kinds of uphill and they’re constantly having to do the self-regulation, deep breath, that’s now like the meditation piece. So I really think this just transcends all the ages.
It absolutely does. And to be honest with you, it never actually really ends because first of all, that frontal lobe, a prefrontal cortex really only kicks in in adulthood. So I have got young adult children and I still have to help them learn to self-regulate.
They’re gonna go, at 16 years old, they’re gonna go to a party and drink too much and vomit and have to work it out themselves. And so, and as a parent, you’ve got to allow them that kind of that leash, give it off to them and then be there to catch them, which you have to do and then help them to learn from the situation so that next time that they’re faced with the same challenge they’re then able to be able to cope with it. So the truth is you’re 100% right.
It’s there for prem babies, it’s there for young babies, it’s there for toddlers and it definitely is there for adolescents as well. So it is, self-regulation is a concept that actually transcends all the ages. It’s really, really fascinating.
Thanks Meg. And thanks everyone for joining us. Yes, thank you Terve.
I always love our sessions where you get to pick my brain and the time flies when we have a chat like this. Always do, always does. Thank you very much.
Thanks to everyone who joined us. We will see you the same time next week. Until then, download ParentSense app and take the guesswork out of parenting.
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