 What steps we take to co-regulate with children who may be struggling with their feelings? That's the topic of today's episode of Pookey Ponders. Let's dive straight in. So co-regulation is the topic of today's episode. This is a Patreon request and one of my patrons said to me, I don't really know what co-regulation is. People talk about it a lot. What is it? Why does it matter and how do I do it? So I thought, okay, let's go. So co-regulation is essentially the way in which that as adults who have learned, hopefully, some of the time to emotionally regulate, to manage how we feel, to keep things in check and allow ourselves to cope and thrive, how we can do this alongside children and young people or indeed other adults who aren't managing that right now, so that together we can kind of find that emotional stability and get to a point where everything feels in check and we are able to manage. Now, this works because of clever neuroscience stuff. Essentially, we have what's called mirror neurons, which make our kind of brains and bodies copy what they see. So this is why sometimes when someone who you know is of a really cheerful, happy disposition, then you tend to feel yourself reflecting that feeling, feeling it too. When they walk in the room, they literally light up the room or when you're with someone who's really calm, cool, collected, it tends to make you feel a bit more calmer and like things are in control. Of course, the opposite can happen. And when you are met with distress or anger, you can feel that that gets reflected too. So when it comes to co-regulation and particularly thinking about how to calm, be angry or anxious type feelings, we're trying to make our calm catching. We want a child to catch our calm. That's our key aim. So what I'll be thinking about in this episode is a few steps that you can take to create that sense of calm that you might be looking for so that you can help a child to find that too. Now, what happens in terms of this co-regulation piece? People worry sometimes that, well, if you're always there to calm and soothe and help a child when they get to these points of emotional distress or unrest, then they're never going to learn for themselves. But actually what we see is the opposite is true. Learning to manage your emotions to calm things down when they're feeling really challenging is big and difficult and it takes a while to learn. But if we've got a good role model and we're able to feel and see how that can work and someone who can support us alongside us, then it's a bit like riding a bike. You know, when you might run along behind at the beginning and the child really needs you to keep holding on. But gradually you get to the point where you can let go and suddenly they're doing it all by themselves and they're not quite sure when it happened. Emotional regulation is a bit like that. And there's going to be days when we're wobblier and we're more likely to fall off and we still need that adult guidance right through to adulthood sometimes. I need a bit of co-regulation on a bad day, even now, and I'm 40. But we will find that children don't not learn to do it because we do it alongside them, it supports and helps them in the process. So don't worry about co-regulation. In fact, every time that you co-regulate with a child and you help them move from a point of distress to managing and coping and feeling like those feelings are in check and they know what to do with them and they're able to continue with their day. Then you are helping them to learn to do this for themselves. So in terms of the bits that we're going to cover off today, I've got six ideas, always a list as commented on recently by one of my lovely patrons. He was wondering, do I always work through a list because that's a specific way I order things? Is it part of my autism? Is it what? I don't know. The reason that I work through lists is because I think in lists. I believe that other people have exciting imaginations where they see things in images or sounds or different things like that. I literally see life as a series of bullet pointed lists. And that's why I work the way that I do. OK, so number one in our list today is low demand. So when we're at a point of emotional dysregulation, high distress, we want to remove as many demands as possible from the situation. So this might be a time when we're going to allow various other things to slip that we might not otherwise, we're not going to be asking the child to do things. We're going to essentially place as few demands on them as we can. So we're going really low demand, really reducing our expectations of the child. This is likely to be more a time of quiet doing together and connection rather than a time when we're expecting a child to respond to us. They might be very not capable of interactive speech or communication at this point. We might we wouldn't be expecting them to get on and do various tasks that might be expected. It might be that the distress is a reason because they have not complied with an order that's been given or their behaviour has been in some way challenging to us. And if those things have happened, we just let that go for now. We let that go for now. We might revisit that later at a time of calm. But all we're going to do, if we would heap those demands on is we're going to overload that brain, we're going to make the situation more distressing. So low demand is number one. And that's kind of something that needs to encompass this whole interaction. Number two is just to think about your breathing. So remember, we're trying to get our calm to be catching for this young person. We need to be alive to the fact that sometimes when faced with a young person who is anxious or angry or distressed in some other way, that we might catch that anger, anxiety, distress and feel ourselves getting a little out of check. So just consciously check in with your breathing. Slow it down. Be taking nice, deep breaths. Be thinking about long, out breaths. I find things like five, seven breathing where we count for five on the way in and breathe out for the count of seven to be really helpful in these situations when I'm just trying to slow it down. You might choose to do a scripted breathing exercise alongside a child as part of your co-regulation. You can teach them these strategies and this gives you a go to script if you're feeling a bit lost for quite what to do here. So you might do something like our feather breathing, where we place our hand out in front of us. We imagine a feather on our hand and we blow for as long as we can to keep that imaginary feather floating in the air. And this encourages those big, long out breaths and tries to prevent that kind of in breaths and panicky breathing that can happen when we're really anxious and kind of angry. And you can get very sort of anxious in the more that that breathing goes like that, the more anxious we get. And it can actually trigger sort of panic and anxiety in itself because it makes our bodies start to feel funny. In fact, just doing that for a few seconds. I've done that for me. So let's imagine blowing that feather. And very quickly, those long, out breaths will start to really calm things down. So you can do a scripted breathing exercise. Just pick your favorite or you can just also be just thinking about your breath, your breathing, making it slow, calming it down because a child will fall and sink alongside you. Even if you're just sitting or walking alongside a child, you will find that after a few minutes, their breathing will fall and sink with you. So let's make sure that this is nice, slow, calm, controlled breathing so that they've got something really great to kind of copy and regulate alongside. Number three, so we've thought about low demand. We've thought about breathing. Number three is about having a really nice, calm voice. Now, anyone who's been to any teaching sessions with me ever, probably I will have mentioned slow, low, low. My all time favorite technique for turning around challenging situations. So slow, low, low is when we think about how we're speaking. We don't really worry too much about what we're saying, but we think about how we're speaking. So we slow down the pace of our speech. We lower the volume and we lower the pitch. So we speak a bit more deeply. We do this because when we are angry or anxious, we speak fast. We speak loud and we speak shrilly, so very high pitched. And we're trying to do the opposite of that. We're trying to do the equivalent of giving an audible hug. And when we speak like this, it sounds very measured. It sounds very in control. It sounds very calm. And this is very soothing and reassuring for the young person, regardless, actually, of what we say. And this can work with great big groups of children, as well as with individuals that you're trying to support. But just check in when you're trying to co-regulate with a child about how your speech sounds and can you apply slow, low, low. Just imagine your favorite bedtime story being read to you and how soothing and lovely that sounds and try to make your voice sounds a little bit more like that. Number four is about body language. So when we're trying to help a child to calm, we're trying to co-regulate with them, just be thinking about what your body is doing. Particularly if whatever distress has brought them here, brought you together in this moment, might be also triggering some thoughts and feelings for you. We can find that we go into kind of defensive body language. We can start building barriers sometimes between ourselves and the child. So just check consciously in with your body. Think about having soft body language. So be thinking about actually softening the body. Just do a quick physical check in with yourself from your head and run down through to your toes. You're tensing the shoulders if you've got your hands and your fists clenched. Just unclench everything and just just consciously relax. But then also just notice, are you holding your body in any ways that is less open? So have we got our arms crossed? If so, choose to uncross them. Have we got our palms as fists? So palms up is the most open way that we can be working with someone. So that's a really open, inviting, calm, safe way to be with someone. Have you got your legs crossed? Again, these are all things that kind of form a barrier. So just think about that open body language and also think as well about your position with regards to the child. Depending particularly on the kind of power dynamics of your relationship, being face to face can feel quite confrontational, particularly if a child is scared and particularly if they've had less than brilliant experiences with other adults. Side by side can often feel much, much safer for a child and much less confrontational. So you might just think about changing your position with regards to them. Forty five degrees also fine, but I wouldn't recommend face to face unless it's a child that you are really, really comfortable with. And this is a position that you have spent lots of time together in and they're happy with it. Or you might be doing something like, say, a board game where that makes much more sense. And there's kind of a barrier between the two of you of like chess, say, and that might make it feel more possible. But just just notice, just notice what your body feels like, what it would look like to the child and how you are positioned in relation to the child. Is there anything that you can do here? Small changes that you can make that will make this feel a bit calmer, a bit more relaxed, a bit safer for the child and a bit more inviting of anything that they might want to ask or to talk about. Number five is thinking about grounding. So grounding, there's so many strategies out there. Do Google it if you want lots and lots of them. But grounding is about bringing ourselves to the here and the now. So when we've got a child who is emotionally dysregulated, who is struggling with big feelings, actually bringing them to right here in the room with us right now can be superbly helpful. Really simple ways of doing that can be to check in with our senses in the room that we're in. So we might be doing something like our five, four, three, two, one exercise, which is where we will have a look around the place that we're in and we'll think about five things we can see. And we might name those out loud or we might point to them depending on the child and whether they're talking or not. We might then think about four things we can hear, three things we can smell. We work down through the senses. Don't get hung up on the order. It doesn't matter. Start with whatever feels easiest. I usually find the visual the easiest one. But whatever feels right for you, order just doesn't matter. But you're just working through your senses and trying to route yourself in the here and in the now. Other kinds of things that you can do here might be looking out the window and gazing at the clouds and noticing what you can see there. Just noticing ourselves here right now. We might really check in with our bodies and how they feel right now. We might think about the feel of our bum on the seat and our feet on the floor. Anything that brings us to right here, right now. And using those senses can really help. What can you hear? What can you smell? What can you taste right now? We're trying to take ourselves away from all the other things around or all the stuff internally or that internal chatter that might be causing distress for the child. And then number six is walking or doing alongside the child. So we can co-regulate not just by consciously sort of sitting there and saying, right, we're going to co-regulate now. But actually in doing an activity together, the easiest activity, the easiest way to co-regulate, in my opinion, is to walk alongside a child. When we fall into step with a child, it sends a really powerful message, I'm here with you. We're on this journey together as cheesy as that might sound. But also you'll find that you fall into step, that your breathing falls in time with each other and that any conversations that might need to be have will happen much more naturally when you're on the move. It also means that silences can happen and they don't feel so awkward as if you're sitting in a room side by side. And you will also be able to look and notice different things in your environment. Get outside if you can, notice a bit of nature and just walk alongside. You can do other things together. So if you're not able to or you don't want to go for a walk, then things like sitting and colouring alongside each other or playing a familiar game together, a board game or something like that can be really helpful. Anything where you're doing alongside the child can create that feeling of kind of companionship. It relieves some of the pressure of the expectations of now because we now have an activity and we can focus on that. And then the other things will begin to follow. And also it just sort of absorbs the time a little bit while perhaps they begin to get to more of a place of calm. So doing alongside can be an incredibly helpful thing. And as I say, my number one favourite there is to walk. But you need to do what feels right for you and the child that you are supporting. So a reminder then of the six ideas that we covered. We thought about being low demand, not placing any demands on the child right now in this moment. We're just focusing on getting things to a place of calm. Then we thought about our breathing and how we can consciously look to breathe more steadily, more calmly, more slowly, perhaps and maybe use a breathing exercise alongside the child. We thought about our voice having a calm, controlled, audible hug of a voice using our slow, low, low speech. We thought about our body language, softening how our bodies feel, thinking consciously about whether we are creating any barriers with crossed arms or legs or whether we've got our fists clenched, for example, and looking to change that to make our bodies feel soft and safe and inviting. Then we thought about grounding, rooting ourselves in the here and now using our senses to give a sense of right here, right now and taking the child away from the chatter in their head or the distress that might be around them. And then finally, number six, we thought about walking alongside or doing something together. I hope that there are some ideas in there that you feel that you can use with the children or young people that you work with or care for. If you find the work that I'm doing helpful and you'd like to support, you can do so in so many ways. 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