In my discussion with educators through training and consultancy, the feedback I get most often is that there has been an escalation in children’s struggles with emotional control and challenging behaviours. It is something which we have seen a great shift in through the last few years particularly, and thus I believe it is worth exploring why this may be occurring. Why is self regulation more difficult? Why do challenging behaviours seem to be escalating? Through conversation with families, educators and an abundance of research I think we can establish a few contributing factors. Keep in mind that there are probably a myriad more reasons for this, but here is what I believe may be the top contributors…
COVID 19
Let’s start with the most obvious contributor and one I think we can all agree on. The global pandemic of COVID 19 has been a challenge for everyone and there is no doubt that lock downs resulted in a feeling of isolation and loneliness amongst us all. It had a significant impact on mental health, particularly in children under five who are in such an important time for development. It has been found that there has been an increase in emotional control and behavioural challenges for preschool age children by 24.3% (Jing, Chang, Wang, Su & Du, 2024). COVID 19 impacted income, living conditions, schooling and more, which had a considerable effect on family stress. We know how important co-regulation is but we can only effectively help our children regulate when we as adults are regulated and COVID made this difficult. Further to this we really haven’t seen this being addressed properly systemically since the pandemic has calmed down. Children, for the most part, seem to have been expected to just pick up and keep moving forward, but some of them didn’t even know what life was like prior to the chaos that was COVID. This is something I believe requires more attention to address the issues on a global scale.
Parenting is hard
In training I always emphasise how difficult parenting can be - it doesn’t come with a handbook. And in today’s society there is increasing pressure on parents to be perfect, but no-one is perfect. It is also important to recognise that psychological research has shown there is no ‘one size fits all’ in regard to parenting styles. What may work for one child, may not work for another (Edlynn, E, 2024). Having said this one of the major parenting trends we have seen increase in popularity has been ‘gentle parenting’. Unfortunately this form of parenting has often been misunderstood and it is important to recognise that when done well, gentle parenting does not equate to permissive parenting. It does, in fact, fall into the category of authoritative parenting. Gentle parenting, according to parenting author Sarah Ockwell-Smith (2012) is parenting with empathy and respect, but still recognising the importance of boundaries. Unfortunately, maybe due to social media, the message has become somewhat skewed and a lot of parents, with the best of interests at heart, have misunderstood this form of parenting and seem to be engaging in a more permissive style of parenting where support and empathy are still strong, but boundaries are less recognised. The psychological research has shown that children depend on parents to provide safe and nurturing relationships. Something we touch on a lot in trauma training is that safety comes from connection, but also from children feeling like the parent knows what is best for them and is in charge.
Furthermore, we all know the cost of living has skyrocketed and parents are having to work harder than ever to provide stable homes for their children. But where does this leave us in an already time poor society? Co-regulation, which is how children learn to self-regulate, takes time. Time that some people just don’t have a lot of in the current economic crisis. As if parenting wasn’t difficult enough, we have the added effects of COVID (as discussed above) and the increased cost of living. Parents face many challenges in today’s society that just didn’t exist previously (or at least were not as prominent) and they deserve our compassion, understanding and support.
Screens are everywhere
This is the last (and perhaps the most pertinent in my opinion) factor we are going to observe. Screen time is at an all time high for children with the growing dependence on technology in today’s society. Technology when used well can be great and is important to children’s 21st century skills. However screen time is used in over abundance, even in some early childhood services. NSW health has strict guidelines for screen time, with recommendations for children under two to have no screen time at all and children 2-5 to have a maximum one hour per day. Most children are getting far more than this. It’s important to recognise here that the issue of being time poor, as discussed above, is difficult to manage and this may contribute to the excessive amounts of screen time children are often exposed to. Screen time has come to be known in the health sector as the ‘digital drug’ because just like with drugs, when children engage with screen time (especially scrolling) it can change the way the brain produces dopamine (a hormone released in times of pleasure and one of our most powerful neurotransmitters) which is likely to put children’s psychological health at risk (Dresp-Langley, B. 2020). In fact, screen media overuse has been linked to a myriad of health issues such as poor sleep quality, shorter sleep duration, increased obesity, lower executive functioning (of which emotional control is a part), and poorer academic performance. Furthermore studies have shown an increase in TV exposure to children under 3 was associated with a 28% increase in attention difficulties at school, while other studies show exposure to screens for children 21 months or younger was significantly associated with aggressive behaviour at 33 months - a result which may be impacted with the amount of violent content viewed (Liu et al. 2021).
Further on the point of screens, though unrelated to children’s exposure to screen time, I was shocked to see recently that a line of phone covers were released which ‘stimulate baby’s brain development’. If we are interacting with our phone so much in front of our babies that we need the phone cover to stimulate their brain instead of us doing it through connection, then something is going very wrong. I understand the well meaning idea behind this as we all use our phones to take photos, but this is a worrying trend to me as children need serve and return interaction to feel connected, learn social skills, and build attunement.
So here I have laid out some factors which may contribute to children’s growing struggles with self-regulation and emotional control. In order to improve outcomes for children it is necessary to explore where we may be going wrong in the first place. Life is hard, and there are often no good answers to the problems at hand, with most things being multi factorial. And to be honest we have only explored what I perceive to be the top contributing factors. There are many more possible elements which might have significant impact - general disconnection in society, lack of education and support for families and educators, impact of the divisiveness of today’s society on adult mental health, social media - just to name a few. And some of these are or may be components of one of the three we discussed. This is just a starting point for reflection so we can all work towards best outcomes for children.
If you would like to learn skills as an educator to help children develop emotional control and support children with challenging behaviours, click on the link below for information on our workshop.
References
Dresp-Langley, B. (2020). Children’s health in the digital age. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 6;17(9):3240
Edlynn, E. (2024). What’s wrong with gentle parenting. Psychology Today. Retrieved 4th November 2024 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/parenting-is-not-a-fad/202403/whats-wrong-with-gentle-parenting
Jing, J. Chang-Jiang, Y. Wang, Y. Su, X. & Du, Y. (2024). Impact of COVID-19 on emotional and behavioural problems among preschool age children: a meta-analysis. BMC Pediatrics. 24:455
Liu, J. Riesch, S. Tien, J. Lipman, T. Pinto- Martin, J. & O’Sullivan, A. (2021). Screen media overuse and associated physical, cognitive, and emotional/behavioural outcomes in children and adolescents: An integrative review. J Pediatric Health Care. 2022 Mar-Apr; 36(2):99-109
Ockwell-Smith, S. (2012). Why gentle parenting is not permissive parenting. S-OS Parenting with Sarah Ockwell-Smith. Retrieved 4th November 2024 from https://sarahockwell-smith.com/2012/11/26/why-gentle-parenting-is-not-permissive-parenting/
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