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

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.

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.