Helping Kids and Teens Manage Emotions

Emotions are complicated and sometimes more so for young people who haven’t yet learned coping skills to manage tough times. McLean’s Abigail Stark, PhD, explains emotion regulation and how we can help children and adolescents tackle their emotions.

Find resources and more about the expert below.

How Do We Regulate Emotions?

What are unhealthy and healthy ways to regulate emotions?

Whenever we feel uncomfortable emotions, whether it’s anxiety, guilt, shame, or sadness, we tend to want to avoid these emotions, to escape from them in the moment, and we find different ways to regulate these emotions in the moment.

Some of these strategies can be helpful in the long term, and some can be unhelpful in the long term.

”I do a lot of work with teenagers, and teenagers can come up with all different unhealthy emotion regulation strategies that are common and can continue into adulthood,” says Stark.

For example, if a teen is nervous about going to a party with their friends, they might engage in drinking behavior, like drinking alcohol beforehand. Or, if a teen feels ashamed or guilty after an experience in school socially, they might engage in self-harming behaviors.

Another teen might feel really sad and alone, and try to regulate or change that emotion by lashing out at their parents or showing anger. All three of these examples are unhealthy emotion regulation strategies.

In the moment, they can absolutely shift or change the emotion, but in the long term, these aren’t strategies that are going to help us get closer to our goals that are sustainable over time.

What are healthier emotion regulation strategies? There are a myriad of different emotion regulation strategies—more than are possible to list at once.

“The number one piece of advice that I tend to have for parents, caregivers, and teachers, is to get curious,” Stark explains. Try out different emotion regulation strategies with your child or teen to figure out what works for them.

Giving an example from her life, Stark shares, “I noticed for myself after a long day at work, if I was feeling anxious or kind of worn down, I used distraction oftentimes. I would go on my phone or watch television. And I noticed in the long term, this was making me feel more anxious, more depleted of energy.”

She continues, “So I tried out something different. I decided to go for a power walk with my dog for 10 minutes. And I noticed this both reduced my anxiety and helped shift the emotion in the moment. This is what worked for me.”

This is not to say that this strategy would work for someone else. This is why it’s so important both to model different emotion regulation strategies for your child, and to try out different ones. Discuss it. How would this work in the long term? What would be some barriers that might come up with a strategy?

Some strategies work in some settings and don’t work in others. For example, some kids will listen to music on their phone or with their headphones when they’re feeling an intense emotion. This may not work in school if they’re not allowed to have their phone in those moments.

We may have to come up with a different strategy, like doing 10 jumping jacks in the bathroom stall, or something to quiet the emotions in the moment.

So, get curious, try out different strategies, and see what works for you and your child.

Encouraging Healthy Emotions

So how can parents, caregivers, and teachers encourage healthy emotion regulation?

First, validate and find out more about the emotion. It can be so tempting—as an adult, you know lots of different coping strategies and may have been through similar situations before—to jump to problem-solving.

What tends to happen when we jump in with problem solving, or use a coping skill like taking a deep breath, is it inadvertently creates a barrier to that child or teen using that coping skill and can create a feeling of misunderstanding.

If you think to yourself about a time when you felt an intense emotion recently, and if someone had jumped in with problem solving that moment with, “Just take a deep breath or meditate for two minutes,” it probably would have felt invalidating and increased the emotions in the moment for you.

This is true for most people. One of the things that caregivers, parents, and teachers can do is to first validate, to communicate that they understand the emotion in the moment.

“It makes sense you’re feeling anxious,” “I can totally understand why you might feel sad right now,” “Of course the first day of school is hard given last year was really tough for you.”

Then, the important piece here is to stay there and not say anything else. Just sit for a moment with that feeling. It can be easy to rush in and say, “But you really should take a deep breath here,” or “But you need to get into school right now.” Instead, it’s important to validate and stick with that for a moment.

Next, propose some different emotion regulation skills or coping skills. Ideally these would be talked about in advance. It’s really hard to try out a new coping skill when you have never tried it before, haven’t practiced it before, and don’t know how it’s going to work for you.

Stark concludes, “Typically, I’ll tell parents, caregivers, and teachers: Come up with two or three skills in advance that you’ll practice with the child and then they have those in their back pocket in the moment.”