How Caregiver Emotional Regulation Affects Children

Caregiving can bring up a lot of big emotions, adding another layer of stress and challenge to what we’re already carrying as individuals. Some of these emotions can feel unwanted, uncomfortable, or even overwhelming. We might find ourselves experiencing guilt, shame, anger, resentment, or loneliness, sometimes all at once.

What happens is that, as caregivers, we’re not only dealing with our own emotions and often we are also navigating our children’s emotions, our partner’s emotions, or the emotions, behaviors, and reactions of our extended family. In that sense, caregiving can become a deeply interactional process, where we’re constantly trying to understand and navigate not only our own emotions, but the emotions of the people around us as well.

Sometimes, it can be really confusing for caregivers to understand where their own discomfort is coming from. Is it stemming from the child’s emotions or behaviors that they are observing and responding to, or is it the caregiver’s own emotional experience that needs regulating? Often, it can be a combination of both. Children and caregivers also have the capacity to influence and escalate each other’s emotions. One person’s distress can quickly affect the other, creating a cycle that can be difficult to understand and navigate in the moment.

Often, caregivers can also find themselves judging or criticizing their own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. We may turn all of those overwhelming emotions inward, becoming more judgmental and critical of ourselves. And when we relate to our emotions in this way, even everyday emotional experiences can become more painful and difficult, adding another layer of suffering to what we’re already going through.

Seemingly, all of these emotional process can seem like something internal and personal, but our emotions as caregivers can affect our children’s capacity for emotional regulation and their broader psychosocial adjustment. That is why it can be really important to understand emotional regulation as a part of the caregiving process, not only so that we can better support ourselves as caregivers, but also so that we can better support our children and our families.

What is emotional regulation?

Adaptive emotional regulation means having some level of control over our emotions and being able to manage them in ways that fit our goals and the situations we’re in. This includes recognizing what we’re feeling, understanding our emotions accurately, and adjusting our emotional responses when we need to. These emotional regulation skills can look different for different people and situations, but they may include being able to manage the intensity, duration, and expression of our emotions.

When we have difficulty regulating our emotions, it can show up in different ways. We may not be able to accurately recognize what we’re feeling, mistake one emotion for another, or misinterpret the source of the emotion, for example, not knowing whether it is coming from within us or being triggered by someone else’s behavior. It can also show up as not knowing how to manage or channel our emotions, and relying on strategies such as emotion suppression, even when those strategies may not be helpful in the long term.

How does a caregiver’s emotional regulation affect their children’s emotional world?

The way we, as caregivers, play a major role in our children’s emotion regulation is often referred to as emotional socialization. Essentially, it describes how caregivers respond to children’s emotions and teach them about emotions along the way. It’s a key process in children’s emotional development.

During this process, helpful responses can look like acknowledging our own feelings, encouraging children to express their emotions, helping them problem-solve appropriately, and teaching them ways to ground themselves.

On the other hand, when we punish or minimize emotions, avoid them, or encourage our children to do the same, it can make it harder for them to understand and regulate what they’re feeling. This can affect not only their childhood, but their emotional development more broadly, including how they experience and respond to emotions in adulthood. These patterns can often carry with us into adulthood, shaping how we relate to our own emotions and the emotions of others.

More specifically, the tripartite model (Morris et al., 2007) gives us three main ways caregivers can influence emotional regulation in children.

First, children learn by watching their caregivers. They observe how we deal with stress, anger, sadness, and other emotions, and they may then adopt similar strategies themselves. This means that even if we are talking to our children about emotions in helpful ways, if we are still using non-adaptive strategies ourselves, our children may still pick up on those patterns and use them as well.

Second, parenting practices, even when they may seem unrelated to emotional regulation, can still affect a child’s emotional development. For example, if you tend to use a more authoritative parenting style, or if you provide a lot of warmth and positive regard, this can lead to different emotional outcomes for children, particularly in terms of what they internalize and how they interpret their experiences. When we provide warm and supportive parenting, it tends to promote healthier emotional development. On the other hand, hostile, rejecting, neglectful, or overly controlling behaviors are often linked to greater emotional difficulties for children.

The third way that children’s emotional development, and particularly their emotional regulation, can be affected by the family is through the overall family emotional climate. This can include the quality of parent-child relationships, as well as the relationships between caregivers and other adults. Children don’t only pay attention to how we regulate our own emotions or how we interact with them. They also closely observe how we interact with other caregivers and adults, including their teachers and specialists.

Children really do monitor these interactions closely. When there are positive relationships overall, with a sense of safety, trust, and transparency, lower levels of conflict, and a healthy level of friction, this kind of environment can help children become better able to understand and regulate their own emotions.

We as people have a limited amount of emotional and physical energy. If we are burnt out and emotionally drained, then it is likely that we will run into some issues with our interactions with children as well. Overall, when caregivers have fewer difficulties regulating their emotions, their children tend to have fewer emotional and behavioral problems. For example, caregivers who can regulate their own overwhelming emotions well through strategies like cognitive reappraisal, mindfulness, and other methods also tend to be warmer and less hostile toward their children because they feel more capacity to do so. 

How can we support ourselves better as caregivers?

When we are going through issues with our children, especially for their behavioral problems or their emotional problems, we tend to seek specialists for children, which can be a great way of supporting our children. However, during this process, caregivers’ own needs for support can be overlooked or not prioritized. But supporting ourselves is not only something we deeply deserve as individuals, but also makes it possible for us to feel more equipped in better supporting our children and family,

Building awareness and self-understanding about our emotions, being able to notice them, name them, understand what triggers them, and how we can express them or contain them through individual therapy or couples therapy, for example, can increase our own capacity for emotional regulation, which can directly or indirectly translate into our children’s own emotional regulation capacities.

Therapy can support us in not only providing a safe space to process our own emotions, but certain therapeutic modalities can also be a little bit more skill-based, such as DBT, so that we can also build new skillsets to take a reflective stance in thinking about our children’s internal worlds, regulate our own emotions and connect with our family in new and more desired ways. This can help us better understand our own kind of dynamics so that we can come up with unique accommodations and changes that we need.

Takeaways:

• Caregiving brings a lot of emotions. This process can get especially difficult since caregiver often navigate not only their own emotions, but also their children’s, partners’, and family members’ emotions and behaviors.
• Emotional regulation is a capacity that involves recognizing and understanding what we’re feeling, managing its intensity, duration, and expression, and responding in ways that fit our goals and situations.
• Our emotional regulation affects our children’s emotional world. Through emotional socialization, children learn from how we regulate ourselves, how we parent, and the overall emotional climate of the family.
• Supporting ourselves is part of supporting our children. Building awareness and self-understanding around our emotions can increase our own capacity for emotional regulation and help us feel more equipped to support our children and family.
• Therapy can provide a safe space to process emotions and build new skills so that we can build more desired ways of connecting with ourselves and our family.

References and further reading

• Morris AS, Silk JS, Steinberg L, Myers SS, Robinson LR. The role of the family context in the development of emotion regulation. Social Development. 2007;16(2):361–388. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9507.2007.00389.x
• Rutherford, H. J., Wallace, N. S., Laurent, H. K., & Mayes, L. C. (2015). Emotion regulation in parenthood. Developmental Review, 36, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2014.12.008
• Zimmer-Gembeck, M. J., Rudolph, J., Kerin, J., & Bohadana-Brown, G. (2021). Parent emotional regulation: A meta-analytic review of its association with parenting and child adjustment. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 46(1), 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/01650254211051086

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