Helping Neurodiverse Children With Emotional Regulation

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“All About Me”

Helping Neurodiverse Children with Emotional Regulation

Discussed in the Episode:

✅ Use the “About Me: Understanding My Feelings” worksheet with photos to help children identify what helps them when feeling wiggly, tired, bored, worried, excited, angry, or sad

✅ Create brainstorming sessions where children share different self-regulation tools (arm pretzel, crunchy snack, deep breaths)

✅ Implement wall pushups as a proprioceptive activity for children feeling slow/tired, fast/emotional, or fast/wiggly

✅ Teach the “seat pushup” technique during assemblies – push on chair with palms flat, count to 5-10

✅ Use “The Palm Push” – pushing palms together for 5-10 seconds as a discrete calming technique

✅ Read “The Red Beast” picture book to help children understand anger expressions

✅ Poll the class to see who uses which strategy in different emotional states

✅ Create a visual menu of regulation activities posted on the whiteboard daily

✅ Practice “sitting up straight” exercises during assembly to help with subtle movement needs

✅ Use emotional literacy activities to help children identify where they feel emotions in their body

Listen now to learn about Emotional Regulation.

The emotional world for people on the spectrum can be very scary! Emotions often come without warning and are difficult to label and connect to a cause, which leaves the person unable to control them. “You cannot control what you cannot define, label, and understand.” ( Excerpt from The Autism Discussion Page, pg 285), therefore it is very important we give the child skills and strategies to understand and regulate their emotions.

Dean Beadle, an adult with ASD, discusses how he was given behaviour cards for bad behaviour. Every term he would receive more and more cards as he didn’t know what he was meant to do. Teaching children about emotions and strategies to regulate emotions makes a huge difference to behaviour. Dean Beadle explains how when he saw himself as part of the solution rather than the problem, that he then knew what he was meant to do. Teaching children to identify their emotions empowers them to identify why the problem is occurring and what strategies they can put in place to address the problem.

Lauren Brukner has written a great series of books to help children regulate their emotions and senses. Children will learn how to label difficult feelings, choose the perfect strategies and tools to tackle them and use these correctly whether at home or at school. The strategies are accompanied by cartoon-style illustrations, and the author includes useful tips for parents and teachers plus handy visual charts and checklists to track learning and progress. (See p9 of The Kids’ Guide to Staying Awesome and In Control for some great practical strategies.)

“The Kid’s Guide to Staying Awesome and In control is crucial in helping children pinpoint how they feel so they can implement which methods work best for them to maximise their learning potential and provide everyday comfort” – Autism Parenting Magazine

In Lauren Brukner’s series children can create their own Self-Regulation Menu – with a selection of body breaks or tools to use (pg 96-100 of The Kids’ Guide to Staying Awesome and In Control ). For some students these would be ideal as Dean Beadle said “so you feel part of the solution not the problem!” Teaching emotional regulation allows kids to be proactive not reactive!