How to Help a Child Regulate their Emotions: Speech Therapy Ideas

It’s no secret that children feel a lot of big feelings.  Our children with emotional regulation issues (such as those with autism, ADHD, anxiety, anger issues, etc.) may feel those feelings even more intensely than other children.  And they also may struggle with knowing how to calm down or get those feelings back into check.  This often leads to outbursts, behavioral challenges, and interpersonal issues.  Check out our tools and resources for helping children regulate their emotions and calm themselves down as needed.

Communication Kit for Challenging Behaviors

Challenging Behaviors Therapy Kit

No-Prep Activities for Teaching Communication Strategies to Reduce Challenging Behaviors

Watch as speech-language pathologist Carrie Clark shows you how to help a child learn to regulate his emotions.  This is quite helpful for children with social language impairments who may have trouble expressing emotions appropriately.

Speech Therapy Ideas for Emotional Regulation:

1. Teach Children to Identify Their Emotions:

http://www.speechandlanguagekids.com/teaching-a-child-to-identify-his-emotions/

2. Once they can identify, talk about which emotions are good and helpful and which ones get in the way

  • Happy, excited, calm are all ok
  • Mad, scared, frustrated, over-excited can be a problem if they get too big
  • Identify which emotions the child has trouble regulating

3. Take the problematic emotions and talk about situations that trigger those emotions and what happens physically (what does the child do)

4. Brainstorm possible ways to regulate that emotion, coping strategies, with the child.

5. Practice coping strategies when not feeling the emotion and have the child choose is favorite 3-5 strategies.

6. Create a choice board with those strategies.

7. The next time the child gets into that emotion or mood, offer the choice board and have him try strategies until he finds one that works.

8. Continue doing this until the child can use the choice board independently or use the strategies without needing to go to the choice board.

Speech Therapy Emotional Regulation Goals:

Check out these sample goals for emotional regulation:

  1. Building Emotional Vocabulary: Student will identify and label basic emotions from pictures using the correct emotional vocabulary words (such as happy, sad, frustrated, etc.)
  2. Identifying One’s Own Emotions: Student will use correct emotional vocabulary to answer questions about how he is feeling in the moment or how he feels during particular situations (such as, how do you feel when someone takes your toy?).
  3. Regulating One’s Own Emotions: Student will identify and use coping strategies for regulating various emotions as needed.
  4. Navigating Others’ Emotions in Social Interactions: Student will identify emotions of others during certain social situations and practice appropriate responses to those emotions.
Communication Kit for Challenging Behaviors

Challenging Behaviors Therapy Kit

No-Prep Activities for Teaching Communication Strategies to Reduce Challenging Behaviors

 

Free Therapy Materials for Behavior Skills:

Check out the freebies that we have inside our Free Therapy Material Library!

Calming Children: Self Calming Strategies

Self Calming Visual Aids

Behavior Analysis Data Sheet

Behavior Analysis Tracking Sheets

Reinforcer Ideas for Motivating Children in Therapy

Reinforcer Ideas for Getting Children Engaged in Therapy

Carrie Clark, Speech-Language Pathologist

About the Author: Carrie Clark, MA CCC-SLP

Hi, I’m Carrie! I’m a speech-language pathologist from Columbia, Missouri, USA. I’ve worked with children and teenagers of all ages in schools, preschools, and even my own private practice. I love digging through the research on speech and language topics and breaking it down into step-by-step plans for my followers.

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