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Parenting a neurodivergent child often means navigating big emotions (theirs and yours!). Emotional regulation is the last executive function to fully develop, and many adults find it challenging too. The good news is that working on emotional regulation skills benefits the whole family: when everyone works on regulation together, children feel supported, the environment adapts to their needs, and their own capacity for emotional regulation grows.
Emotional regulation is the ability to notice, understand and respond to emotions in helpful, healthy ways. It’s not about suppressing or ignoring feelings, but learning to work with them.
Developing effective emotional regulation skills means being able to:
Mental health: Without effective emotional regulation skills, difficult emotions can spiral into anxiety, depression, burnout or shutdown. Learning to tolerate discomfort and move through it builds emotional resilience and stability.
Learning and school life: Children who can manage emotions find it easier to focus, pay attention and stay engaged. Regulation also supports motivation and perseverance, which are essential qualities when tasks are frustrating or challenging. It also improves peer relationships and classroom harmony.
Decision-making: When emotions run high, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and judgement) can go offline. This can lead to impulsive reactions or shutdowns. Emotional regulation creates a pause between feeling and reacting, allowing for calmer, more appropriate responses.
Relationships: Emotional regulation skills help children (and adults) to manage conflict, build empathy and maintain positive relationships with others. These strong emotional bonds act to reduce tension at home and in other social environments.
Routines and transitions: Even everyday transitions such as moving between activities or environments can be particularly difficult for neurodivergent children. Emotional regulation skills help to ease transition stress, leading to fewer outbursts and smoother daily routines.
Emotional dysregulation happens when feelings become so intense that it’s hard to think clearly, communicate, or respond calmly. For children, this often looks like meltdowns, shutdowns or “explosive” reactions. For adults, it might show up as irritability, snapping, withdrawal or feeling flooded and unable to respond in the way they’d like.
Dysregulation is a nervous system in distress, not a sign of failure or “bad behaviour”. When the brain perceives a threat (even something as small as a sudden change, sensory overload, or criticism), the body switches into survival mode: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Logical thinking takes a back seat until the person feels safe again.
Both children and adults experience dysregulation, especially in stressful situations. For neurodivergent children and adults, this can be more frequent or intense due to differences in sensory processing, communication, or executive functioning. Understanding what triggers dysregulation helps parents respond with empathy and calm, rather than frustration or guilt. The goal isn’t to avoid all emotional storms but to learn how to weather them safely and recover together.
Staying calm when you’re exhausted, stressed or worried is a challenge for any parent. Yet your own regulation plays a vital role in your child’s. Children are not yet able to regulate in isolation as their brains are still developing, therefore they require co-regulation, the process of calming and managing emotions together.
When parents model regulation, it creates a positive feedback loop: your calm presence helps your child’s nervous system settle, and in turn, their calmness supports yours. Over time, this strengthens connection and reduces emotional escalation.
Triggers such as sensory overload, fatigue or competing demands can make regulation harder, so recognising and addressing these factors for all members of the family is a key part of family wellbeing.
Simple, shared strategies can make a real difference:
Every child and every family is different, so a personalised approach to building emotional regulation skills is often most effective. The Assembly Emotional Regulation Programme offers support for both parents/carers AND child simultaneously through family focused activities that are tailored to your family’s specific needs.
Emotional regulation is about so much more than calming down. It’s about learning skills to navigate life’s challenges, recover from stress, and connect with others.
Building emotional regulation skills as early as possible helps to shape healthy neural pathways while the brain is still developing. During childhood and adolescence, the brain is especially flexible - this “neuroplasticity” means experiences and repeated practice can literally strengthen the connections between emotional and thinking areas of the brain.
Starting early doesn’t just make learning easier for children; it also prevents unhelpful patterns of stress or avoidance from becoming deeply embedded later on. When families learn these skills together, they build resilience, reduce emotional escalation, and strengthen relationships across the whole household.
Emotional ups and downs are a normal part of growing up, and moments of parental overwhelm are equally human. Everyone can build emotional regulation skills and small, consistent changes add up to long-term progress for the whole family.