We are the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, or ACAHM for short. And this is ACAHM Learn. Hello, everyone. My name is Alessio Bellato. Today, I will be talking to you about emotional regulation in children and young people, especially focusing on early childhood. I am a lecturer in child and adolescent mental health at the University of Southampton, and an honorary assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia, and also part of international networks, including the Centre for Innovation in Mental Health and the Southeast Asia Mental Health Consortium. So the aims of today is really to talk a bit about the major developmental changes in emotion regulation from middle childhood, approximately six years of age through adolescence up to 18 years. This is really important because there are many factors, biological, psychological, and social, that really interact together with each other to influence emotional development during these crucial years. And lastly, I really want to provide you with some ideas, some reflections about potential strategies for supporting children and young people's emotional regulation skills across different environments. Something that, for example, you could do at home, something that actually they have to do, for example, at school to understand more about their emotions, what they experience, and also how to regulate and make sense of their emotional experience. We also have another session on early childhood. So we talk about emotional regulation, emotion expression in young childhood, so in the first six years of life. So please check it out if you want to know more about that age range as well. So whenever we talk about emotional regulation, this is a question that a lot of people ask themselves, how can I be good? How can I regulate my emotions? And even as adults, sometimes, you are asked this question, how can I do that? It's a very challenging situation. How can I cope with that? Or if you have a teenager, a child or adolescent, and you might ask yourself, why can't they regulate? Why are they angry all the time? Why are they sad all the time? So to better understand this question, and you will see also in the other video that I recorded on early childhood, I usually flip this question in three main sections. We need to understand about emotion. We need to understand how we can regulate emotion, how we regulate emotions as humans, and how we regulate emotions, in this case, particularly, as children and adolescents. And then we really need to understand, OK, can all children and adolescents regulate their emotions in the same way? Or could it be, for example, that some children will require more support than others. And then what can we do if we identify a child or an adolescent that is experiencing some challenges, struggling with their emotions and emotion regulation? What can we do? So let's start with emotion in childhood and adolescence. A clear definition of emotions is actually the following, the one that you see on the screen right now. Emotions are physical, but also mental states that are caused by anything that can happen in the environment, an event, stimulus, or a specific situation that trigger a change in our emotional state. And the link between what we experience and what we express actually changes throughout life. In the first years of life, usually whatever we experience from an emotional standpoint is also expressed. We have a lot of children, very young children, for example, that are happy. And you can see that can see when they are playing, they are happy, they smile all the time, and so on, and so on. And then at some point, maybe they become angry, and you can straight away see it in their faces that they are changing what they are experiencing. So these links that you will see today will become weaker and weaker as we grow up, because we experience a lot of things, if you think about your own life. We experience a lot of things in our own life, a lot of good, positive thoughts, a lot of bad negative thoughts. But what we express is only a fraction of that. So what we are focusing on today is really on this arrow. What stands between what we experience and what we express emotionally? And also what we are also considering, especially when we look at the strategies and how we can support children and young people to better regulate their emotion. We need to keep this link in mind, the association between body and mind. So what happens in our mind, psychologically, really affects also how the body behaves and vice-versa. What happens in our body affects also how we think and what we think about. And it's really important to keep that connection in mind. So let's take a look at how emotions are experienced and expressed in the range. So I'm talking about here middle childhood, early adolescence. So this is a crucial period. We have seen in the other video, obviously, that there are a lot of changes as well in the first six years of life. But the story has not yet ended. Story is getting more and more complicated, actually, because as soon as a child enters their 8, 10 years of age, they become more and more aware of their own, but also other's emotion. So we are in a period where brain development is still ongoing. We have a lot of things going on, not only in the body, but also in the brain. A lot of structures getting basically better, more specialised, more connected to each other. And this is actually what drives this increased awareness and increased understanding of our own emotional state, but also other people. We become better at labelling, but also recognising more complex emotions, including embarrassment, jealousy, shame. And we also understand that emotions can quickly change shape. We really develop what we call metacognition, which is the ability to think about what we think. For example, when we are in this age range or as adults, we know that, for example, yes, maybe now we are happy, but we know that if something changes later on, or we have something else that we don't really want to do later, we know that our emotions are going to quickly change shape. They are going to quickly change. So we are able to really infer and to really plan and predict what is going to happen based on the situation that we are in or that we think we will be in. Obviously, this is a very complex chain of thoughts that could be sometimes problematic. What I would like you to remind now is that, really, at this age, we start making these connections. We start understanding a bit more about the connections between different emotions and different experiences. And we start really living in what we call a society. While we were much younger, we were in small groups, small kindergartens. We lived most of the times with our parents, our caregivers. As soon as we get older, we really start entering other groups, our sport club, our hockey club, our circle of peers. Obviously, this is a good thing. But is it really a good thing? Is, in part, a good thing, obviously, because it allows us to become independent, to grow up as adults? But it's also exposed us to a lot of problems and a lot of challenges, because what we need to learn when we enter society is that the link between what we experience and what we express need must become weaker and weaker. Because emotions become more linked to what we call the micro-social context. So, for example, when you have a child who is at home, they are supposed to behave in a way that could be very, very different to what they do to how they behave, for example, at school, because there are different expectations at home, in the family environment, at school, let's say, your sport club, and depending on the sport that you are in. Because what we are also seeing is that a lot of emotions are linked and associated with peer acceptance. So we express, so we understand when while we grow up, that we need to show emotions in a way that other people like to be accepted in a group, in a certain group. We need to show something or, for example, hide some emotion, not show fear or not show that you cry in public because you never know what other people are thinking about you. Obviously, these are stereotypes, but it's something that probably, can resonate with you as well. And children, they start also taking different roles. So for example, it could be that when they are at home, maybe they are the younger sibling, and maybe, obviously, they live and behave in a way where they are the youngest. But maybe at school or maybe at a sport club, they are the oldest. Obviously, the role is very, very different, and how you master those roles from an emotional standpoint could be really challenging for children. And it's something that we really need to keep in mind. Now, we also need to think more globally. So besides micro-social context, we also need to be aware that based on where we live and grow up, specific cultural roots. For example, the fact that in some societies, it is more common for people, even adults, to show emotions in public. In other societies, it could be in other countries. this is really something that is not seen very well or appropriate. And it's important that we also understand that because how we understand emotion regulation and emotions, for example, in Western countries could be very, very different from other countries worldwide. When we grow up, and we are talking here about adolescence, again, the story becomes more and more complex, especially because there are further changes in our development as humans. We start seeing hormonal changes and body changes that we have never seen before. And this actually causes a lot of challenges, especially in relation to emotional intensity and reactivity. The main message that I would like to bring home here is that adolescents really experience emotions at a higher level than both children and adults. So the level of intensity of different emotions, both positive and negative, is much higher during adolescence, primarily because you have all these hormonal changes, a lot of biological changes in the body, and the fact that the prefrontal systems that should make sense of all these experiences are not fully mature yet. So there is a bit of an imbalance between something that is developing very, very fast, a lot of experiences that are new, that are complex, but the brain that is not yet fully ready to actually make sense and fully understand what we could do when we are in unfamiliar or challenging situation, like any basically day of adolescence, if you think back. We are exposed to even more complex experiences. We start experiencing romantic feelings, but also existential anxiety. What should I do about my life? And what we call moral conflicts. I behave in a way that is moral, that is fair. And it's really something. These are very, very complex experiences that it is even difficult to define in a [INAUDIBLE] here. But think about that, when you were in adolescence, and when you started thinking about any of these and the experiences that actually were associated with any of these. As I introduce also before, adolescence is a time where we start thinking about what we think. We start reflecting on our own, but also other people, emotional, and thinking patterns to really make some associations, to increase, strengthen this association. And some people, some adolescents, for example, they might ask themselves, why do I always feel this way? Why do I always react like that when something happened to me? This is not a bad way. It's not a bad thing, to be honest, because it's really an opportunity that adolescents are given to reflect on how they behave. And if they want to make some changes, some adjustments, that's the right time to do. Even adulthood is the right time to do it. But this is the first time that adolescents become fully aware of what's going on. They make the association. And they are independently capable of making adjustment and change. It's also the imaginary audience factor to consider basically, that adolescents are very self-conscious. They are always aware of how they are perceived or how they think, other people perceive them. They always think that people are staring, looking at them. And this is something important. This is, again, something really, really important, if you think about any both positive but also negative emotions that could arise from this kind of change of thoughts and thinking patterns. This is very much related to also the development of our identity. And our identity, especially in adolescence, is closely related to our body image. There's a lot of social comparison going on, and a lot of the emotions that are experienced, but also expressed, are in social environments, peer groups, groups of friends, a bit less at school. But really a lot of the identity formation happens within peer relationships. And it's really, really important to consider when we think about how body image, but also the development of identity is related to emotional expression. Because sometimes what happens in adolescence is that you have adolescents who somehow try to go towards one specific identity, and they understand, OK, I want to be like that person. I want to model, resemble the specific identity and personality style. I have to be like that. So I have to show, for example, that kind of emotion and maybe hide another part of my identity. Now, if the real and true identity matches with that, it's another story. And obviously, when we think about mental health, it's important that we are aware of this as well. Emotional expression in this age range is primarily linked to social acceptance and rejection and the sense of belonging as well. So as we said before, the link between experience and expression is getting weaker and weaker. And you have adolescents that really start choosing what they want to express because they want to-- they want other people to perceive them in a specific way. And again, these are positive, but also negative, as we will see later. We got a stronger awareness of broader or global social and cultural rules, promotional expression. Obviously, parents are still playing an important role. So the family environment, the cultural environment, and social environment surrounding the family is still there. It's still present. Obviously, it could clash a bit with the type of identity or personality that the adolescent is trying to develop. But that's, again, another story. But it's important to understand that sometimes the clash that we see are because the adolescents are independently developing their own social world. And this could be really clashing, going against the more global or wider sociocultural rules. So how do adolescents and young people, and also children, actually, because, again, we're talking about children as well, regulate their emotions? In the other video, and I really suggest you take a look at the other video, where we talk a bit more in detail about what is emotional regulation, and what do we need, and what do we use to regulate our emotions. Just to recap, this is the definition of emotional regulation that we see is a very complex definition, a very long one. But when we talk about emotional regulation, it's really our ability to do what we have talked about until now, the ability to understand, to monitor our emotional state and experiences, to make sense of that, evaluate, but also modulate, change our behaviours when we need. And if we are in a social situation, obviously, we need to behave in a way that is perceived as socially appropriate. And this is actually a very brief and simplistic definition of emotional regulation. To do that, to be able to do all these things, we need to use our brain. We need to be able to modulate our brain systems, especially the frontal areas that are responsible for higher level, cognitive level of thinking. We need to regulate, being able to regulate our physiological level of arousal and stress, basically, our body. And we need to learn a lot of mental thinking related, but also behavioural strategies. For example, leaving a room where we are overwhelmed by everything or telling people, sorry, I cannot do this. I cannot think about this. Please give me a second. I need to step back for a moment. These are behavioural strategies to protect ourselves when we feel overwhelmed and emotionally dysregulated. Still, we need the social support. Because even as adults, think about your friends, your family, your partner, whenever we struggle, we do not want to be alone. Adolescents as well, I know it's difficult to believe, they do not want to be alone. Maybe they do not want to be with us as parents or caregivers when they are struggling, but they want to be with someone. And that someone is something that I'm going to talk to you and try to show what that companion could look like for an adolescent. We have different ways to regulate emotion. However, we do not know really, in relation to adolescence or even young adulthood. What does good emotional regulation mean? Because there are so many strategies that we can implement. And here, you can see only some of them that it's really, really difficult to understand. What does work for that specific child? There is not a single answer. And even for us, adults, we have different ways through which we can regulate our emotions. Some of us do it by controlling our emotions. Others do it by rethinking, reappraising, try to understand a bit more about the situation. The usual categorization that we have in research on emotion regulation is between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Adaptive strategies are all of these. And I do not have time today to talk about all these strategies, but I have made here some examples of basically positive approaches to emotion regulation. The most important one probably are acceptance and cognitive reappraisal, which is something that I would like to talk to you about. And then in the next slide, we will see a list and some examples of what we call maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. These are strategies that work, maladaptive regulation strategies. They work on the short term, but they are not really that good or healthy on the longer term. And we will see that in a moment. Going back to the list of adaptive emotional regulation strategies, if you have a child that, for example, tells you, oh, it's OK to feel sad sometimes, or this feeling will pass. They are a bit older. This is really a good sign because they are showing you that they can accept the fact that whatever they are experiencing is temporary, and it's only an experience. Being sad, or feeling sad or feeling angry is not something negative per se. And it's important to be accept-- it's important to accept and also validate any emotional experience that we have. And similarly, it's important that we somehow teach a model and try to engage children and young people in its cognitive reappraisal. OK, you experience this. Try to rethink about that. Maybe it could be that they said that specific bad word because they were sad or maybe angry themselves, or maybe they had a bad time at school. Or for example, if you want to think a bit more generally, OK, this happened. You failed your exam. And you are a university student. You think that you are a failure in life. That's what happened. You failed one exam. Great. That's fine. And so this isn't really the end of the world. This is really a good sign. OK, you failed this exam. But try to think about the positive of this experience, You failed. Why? Did you take a look at the feedback, for example, from your lecturer, from your teacher? Can you try to maybe improve and hopefully do better next time? Teaching these kind of strategies is really, really important. So I leave this slide to you, obviously, as a PDF so that you can take a look and try to see if other examples are resonating with your own experience. If you go back to the second category, so the maladaptive set of emotion regulation strategies, as you can see here, these are strategies that usually, we use a lot even as adults, when we react without thinking to something happening to us. We might engage in some of these. And again, as I said before, these are really, really good for us on the short-term because they can help us to, let's say, cope with the situation very quickly. But on the long-term, we know that these are not healthy. And they can really put a toll on mental health. For example, self-blaming or other blaming are maladaptive emotion regulation strategy that some children, but also adolescents, can engage with. For example, when you say, oh, it's my fault, if my mum or my dad is upset. Or oh, it's just me, I ruin everything. I'm a failure. Everyone is against me. All these strategies where you really blame ourselves or other people are not really productive or constructive at the end of the day. They are just a way to put and to give a negative connotation to an experience. So they are usually, again, a sign of less mature emotional regulation in children, and especially adolescents, but also adults. That's why it's important that we try to pay attention. Whenever we see any of these signs, try to take a look back at the previous slide and try to also make the child or the adolescent reflect about this. You say, for example, that everyone is against you. Why is that? Why do you think that you perceive that? And even if everyone is against you, what does it change to your life? Can we try to accept this a bit and try to understand a bit more? So always try to change from a maladaptive strategy to ideally, an adaptive one because that's really important here. So this last five, 10 minutes of the session, I really like to focus on the last part, on the last section of our question. Can all children and young people regulate their emotions in the same way? And what if they cannot do It? What if they are experiencing a challenge, what can we do to support them? So here are some signs of potential worry. that could be that if you see these signs, you might be worried about a child, and also, try to understand why. You have many children that have dramatic shifts in mood. You see that every day, if you are a teacher or if you're an educator or a parent. This is because really, again, children, but also adolescents as well, they are experiencing more and more unfamiliar situations and also emotional. They experience things that they have never experienced before. They cannot yet put a name on it. So it could be that the emotional vocabulary is still developing. So these are reactions to something that children cannot make sense. And this is really important, again, to always sit back and try to understand together with them, what are they experiencing? Can they put a name on it? And if not, can you help with that? In children, you also see sometimes the emergence of these all-or-nothing thinking or very harsh self-blame. For example, children telling you, oh, I'm so bad. I cannot do that. Or maybe just because they have lost a match at football, or maybe they lost it at a specific game. This is because, again, the brain is still developing. So there is limited experience with what we call flexible thinking. And children are still learning a lot about causes and effects in their new social and complex emotional world. A lot of children as well, some of them, not all of them, but some of them could also have a bias toward specific stimuli, specific events. For example, they could pay too much attention to negative emotions, negative events. They ruminate a bit too much. They really focus on their failures and forget about their successes. It's always important that we, as adults, we try to rebalance that and make them aware also of the other side, especially if you see that they are focusing too much on negative events and negative emotions. Something that we have said before, it's important to consider that the neural system is still developing and the prefrontal systems are not there yet, meaning that there is an increased, basically, a more intense experience of emotions. And there is something that we see a lot, especially recently in children, even very young, an increased sensitivity to rejection. Children are scared. They are really afraid of being rejected by their peers. And usually, what they do when they experience this, they withdraw. For example, say, well, I not want to go to school, or I do not want to go and try this new thing because I'm worried that I will be rejected. It's important to try to understand if anything happened, for example, in the same setting, if there is any previous experience of exclusion and invalidation because sometimes, it could also be that there are some early issues with attachment, but also inconsistent social experiences that could explain increased sensitivity to rejection. On the other side, you might have not children that withdraw, but children that are too much aggressive, for example, they are too much prone to conflict. And it could be, once again, because their body is changing, there is poor impulse control. The brain is still developing, still developing this higher level ability to stop, take a breath. Think about what you're doing before, let's say, reacting very impulsively to something that happened to you. There is a lot nowadays of social media, a lot of negative role models there. And some children that might see might be attracted to this role model. So it's really, really important to also understand whenever you see especially this proneness to conflict, verbal or physical aggression, to try to go back and try to understand what could be the root cause of that, and in relation to any role model that the child is looking at or somehow admiring. Lastly, you might have some children who are cognitive inflexible that might be stuck in worries or frustrations, that could blame others or themselves excessively. Sometimes you see these because, once again, we have a developing brain, a developing body. And there is difficulty. Some children really struggle to shift away independently, their attention away from emotions, and they cannot really focus on what we call reasoning. And that's something that we can help them with. So whenever you see someone, and if you work with or you have a child who is somehow less flexible, try to work with them to first, disengage attention away from those negative emotions, negative events, negative experiences. And especially if they are under stress, the first thing to do is, OK, let's protect you from that. Let's take you out of that situation. And only when the child is taken out of that distressing situation, you can try to reason and try to portray, for example, alternative strategies through which they could, in the future, approach the same situation later. In later adolescence, you can see, again, slightly different patterns, not in all children, again, in some. So again, if this is something that resonates with you, I think it's very important to focus on it. You can see some adolescents experiencing intense mood swings, sudden changes in emotional patterns. Again, this is driven probably by hormonal patterns, but also peer and social influence that we know could forever change patterns of emotional reactivity and expression. So you could have sudden changes in how adolescents behave. And from one day to another, maybe one become more aggressive or become somehow more regulated. And this is something that is very, very normal and could change multiple times across adolescence and even later. A lot of the catastrophizing, some adolescents, they focus a lot on negative events and experiences. They say, for example, I'll never be good enough. It's important to consider that abstract thinking, also, the ability to empathise, to become empathetic with other people is still developing. We should never treat adolescents as fully matured adults from an emotional standpoint, because there are still developmental stages that they need to pass through before being really, really capable of independently regulating emotions. Some of them could engage in risk taking behaviours or withdrawal from activities. And we need to remind ourselves that this is really their first attempt to become fully independent. The problem is that, again, the brain is not really ready to support that. And a lot of experiences in late adolescence are romanticised. If you think about movies that in the past, for example, there was a lot of romanticization of smoking, drugs, and risky behaviours, in general. And we really need to think about that as well, when we think about emotional regulation in adolescence. Some, unfortunately, engage in self-harm and other risky behaviours. And the reason why some adolescents engage in these behaviours is because these are, as well, some regulatory strategies on the short term, especially from a physiological perspective. Self-harm, we know is something that adolescents engage with because self-harm or engaging in risky behaviours can lead to a state of short-term well-being and sense of relief. And again, this is something that it is very, very important to consider. So it's always important, again, to propose alternative strategies that are more adaptive and, obviously, healthier. Whenever we think about peer opinions, body image, or online validation, we have some adolescents that, unfortunately, engage in a lot of worry, a lot of rumination about body image. The reason we need to be aware that this is a period of life, where probably social awareness is at the highest level and the drive for belonging as well. So adolescents, they really want to be accepted in new social circles, in most popular social circles. There are a lot. They are very much more vulnerable to rejection sensitivity. And we know nowadays as well to social media pressure and social pressure as well, not in digital environment, which is really important. Mentalization is still immature. So a lot of adolescents are taking things personally, and they might react very impulsively because probably they are still struggling, and they are still not there in what we ask them to do. We see a lot of caregivers and parents, for example, that ask adolescents to engage in higher level reasoning. For example. OK, try to understand this. Why you do that? Think about that. But independently, it's not easy to do that independently, especially when there is a lot going on in your life. So when you have an adolescent telling you, oh, you hate me, or telling you, I don't know why you feel like that. OK. Let's not take things personally, as well, on the other side, and try to guide them through these very higher level reasoning, which we know that sometimes collapse during stress. And you have these very impulsive reactions from adolescents and young people. Just to conclude, we have this slide where we show what we can do, what helps. We have already talked a bit. I already talked a bit about what helps in childhood and adolescence and young adulthood. But it's really important once again, as we discussed in relation to very young children, to provide a safe space where children and young people in any form they want, through any methods they want, they can express their emotion, both positive and negative. And our role as adults, as caregivers, as parents, as educators, sometimes, as employers as well, is really to validate those experiences. To say, OK, I understand. I've been an adolescent as well. I've been a young person as well. I don't understand what you're experiencing at the moment, but tell me more about it. What you experience is valuable. Try to be non-judgmental. Try to be honest in communicating and in encouraging independence, with guidance, sure. But independence is important, especially in adolescents. You are struggling. What would you like to do? Do you want advice? Do you need just me to listen, for example? So try to stay present, but not intrusive, and try to encourage children and young people to engage in activities that make them feel really safe and good. And that's important because that's what we do as adults. We all have our own routines, our own activities that we do because we like them. Whenever we are stressed, for example, maybe we go for a walk in a nice park, or we play a specific sport because we like that. And that's how we found our safe space. So what we need to do is really help children, young people, to find their own safe space. So that when they are independent, when they go out to university or live in another city, they are really well equipped. They know about the strategies because we show them what to do in a specific situation, but also they know that we are there. So whenever they want to talk, we are there, basically, for that. So to conclude, this is a question that I asked sometimes myself. Is really growing up a journey towards self-regulation? Is there a point where we as adults, for example, become very good, perfect at regulating emotion? I do not think so. I think that our lives are really unique stories. Some aspects of these stories, as I said, in many other presentations, are shaped even before we are born. So we have infants. We have adolescents who are maybe more susceptible to rejection. They experience more negative emotions than others. And we cannot do much about that. And we know that also our life, our story, is continuously influenced by whatever life throws at us, for better or for worse. And we need to always be ready to accept that. So acceptance and understanding of what we experience is really, really crucial here. We really need to remember that social norms, including, unfortunately, those related to gender, continue still today in 2025, continue to shape. Which emotions are seen as acceptable to express? We still have people saying that if you are a boy, you should show this type of emotion. I do not think that this is adaptive at all. This is really maladaptive because this teaches something that we know is not healthy, especially in the long term. So providing a safe space where every child, every adolescent can express whatever emotions they want to express is really, really fundamental. And it's important to also ask ourselves, how are safe and adaptive emotional expression and regulation valued across different settings and environments, including schools, universities, and workplace? So to me, and this is actually how I would like to conclude the session, emotional maturity doesn't really mean never struggling. It means learning, it means adapting, and finding safe ways to feel and be supported. And what we really need to make sure is that each of us deserves to be heard, deserves to be validated, and deserves to be helped when emotions feel too big to carry alone. I would like to thank you for paying attention to this session. If you want to be in touch, this is my email address. And this is a QR code where you can access my website and know more about the different projects that I'm conducting. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]