Emotional regulation and emotional dysregulation: what are they?
Emotional regulation is when you tune in to your emotions and manage them so you can react appropriately to how you’re feeling and what’s happening around you.
Emotional dysregulation is when you have difficulties with understanding and managing your emotional responses.
How ADHD affects emotional regulation for children and teenagers
Children and teenagers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience the same emotions as their peers, but emotional regulation can sometimes be challenging for them.
If your child has ADHD, these emotional regulation challenges might happen because they:
- experience emotions more intensely and for longer periods
- feel a lot of emotions at once
- find it hard to keep things in perspective
- find it hard to manage their responses to situations.
Life with ADHD can bring challenges that mean your child needs to manage their emotions more frequently than their peers. For example, if your child is having classroom or friendship difficulties, this can bring up a lot of emotions. If it happens a lot, the emotions can build up and it can be harder for your child to manage them.
Why it’s important to work on ADHD emotional regulation
If your child has ADHD, challenges with emotional regulation might affect their ability to do and enjoy day-to-day activities.
For example, your child might:
- give up quickly on challenging tasks
- avoid interacting with people
- worry about small things
- take offence to any criticism
- want to do or get things immediately
- be easily frustrated
- have trouble calming down after strong emotions.
Emotional regulation is an important part of self-regulation for children and teenagers with ADHD. And self-regulation is important for learning, behaviour, relationships and development.
Strategies to help your child recognise emotions: 3-8 years
For children with ADHD, the first step in learning about emotions is working on awareness of their own and other people’s emotions.
Here are strategies that you can use to help your child recognise and name emotions:
- Label emotions as you and your child come across them during the day. You can point out emotions when you’re reading, watching TV or visiting friends. For example, ‘They’re crying. They feel sad’.
- Help your child work out how their body feels when they’re feeling an emotion. For example, ‘When you feel nervous, it can feel like you have butterflies in your tummy’, or ‘When you feel angry, your cheeks might feel hot, and you might want to hit something’.
- Draw a picture of the body to show where people feel emotion – for example, sweaty palms or a faster heartbeat.
- Ask your child to draw how they’re feeling.
- Encourage your child to explore emotions through play or creative activities. Play ideas to develop preschooler emotions and play ideas to develop school-age emotions include messy play, drawing or painting, puppet play, dancing and music play.
- Do an emotions activity with your child. For example, you could choose an emotion like ‘excited’ and act it out with your child. You can turn this activity into a simple guessing game.
Your child’s emotions influence how they behave. This happens even if your child doesn’t understand the emotions they’re feeling. For example, if your child is feeling sad, they might not want to play with a friend. Or if they’re feeling excited, they might jump around.
Strategies to develop your child’s emotional regulation skills: 9-18 years
Pre-teens and teenagers with ADHD might know the words for emotions but still have trouble recognising them in themselves and others, particularly when they’re upset.
Here are strategies to help your child develop their skills for emotional regulation:
- Point out your child’s emotions. Start with emotions like happiness, fear and anger, and then move on to more complicated emotions like jealousy, frustration or embarrassment. For example, ‘I can see that you’re frustrated. Are you having difficulty with your homework?’
- Encourage your child to start labelling their emotions. For example, ‘When I was watching a movie yesterday, I felt happy’.
- Describe your own emotions. For example, ‘When I was waiting in line in the shop, I felt worried that we were going to be late’.
- Point out emotions in characters in movies. For example, you could watch Inside Out or Inside Out 2 together and talk about how the characters’ behaviour shows what they’re feeling.
- Encourage your child to notice early physical signs of emotions and describe the sensations in their body. For example, you could point out how their heart beats faster when they’re feeling scared.
- Ask your child to describe what was happening around them when they felt an emotion. For example, ‘You seemed angry after netball training. Can you describe what happened before you felt angry?’
- Encourage your child to explore their emotions through creative activities, like writing, gaming, drawing, or playing or listening to music.
- Talk with your child about how their emotions might affect their friendships. For example, it’s important for your child to recognise how their friends are feeling. Or they might need to work out how to handle it when they feel frustrated with friends.
Emotional regulation strategies for your child
Here are emotional regulation strategies for times when your child needs to manage their emotions. You might need to help and encourage your child to use these strategies to start with, but your child can learn to use many of them independently:
- Use a 5-step process for calming down for children or calming down for teenagers.
- Make a list of things to do when strong emotions are building up, like taking a break, getting a drink of water, going for a walk or run, shooting basketball hoops, listening to music or a podcast, reading a book, or finding a quiet place to sit. If there are plenty of options on the list, your child can choose things that feel right in different situations.
- Try breathing exercises, muscle relaxation techniques or mindfulness.
- Use self-compassion for children or self-compassion for pre-teens and teenagers. For example, your child could say something kind to themselves like ‘I can do this’ or ‘I can tell myself to slow down and take a breath when things go wrong’.
Your child learns how to recognise and manage their emotions by watching you. If your child is experiencing a big emotion and this is affecting your own emotions, take a moment to calm yourself. Then you can help your child calm down. When you wait until you’re both feeling calm, you can share your feelings and talk about how each of you managed your emotions.
Getting help with emotional dysregulation and ADHD
If your child with ADHD seems to be experiencing emotional dysregulation, an experienced professional can help your child learn to recognise and manage their emotions.
A good first step is talking with your child’s GP, paediatrician or psychologist or another health professional.