Dear Families, 

One of the main components of Social Emotional Learning is Self Regulation. Self regulation is your ability to manage your emotions and behavior appropriately in the situation. 

For students this relates to their ability to:
-control high emotional responses -calm themselves down when they begin to get upset -adjust to change appropriately -have appropriate social and emotional responses to peers
and adults, and have a sense of control over their body and environment

Your student has learned self-regulation strategies from various social emotional curriculum.  Some of these include The Line of Choice, Hand Brain Model, Zones of Regulation and Kelso’s Choices. These curricula provide students with quick and easy visuals to help make sense of their body, their emotions and their reactions toward others and their environment.

In addition, you can learn more about how to support your child's development of self regulation skills by reading this quick article from the Child Mind Institute on How we can help kids with self regulation? https://childmind.org/article/can-help-kids-self-regulation/  

Throughout the year, students will learn a variety of tools to use for controlling their emotions and choices. However, the best learning comes from practice and repetition. You can help your child with self regulation by doing the following at home: 
-Talk about and acknowledge different feelings you/he/she are experiencing. Name it to tame it. When students recognize what the emotion looks and feels like they are better able to control it. 
-When you see your child beginning to get upset, ask them “where are you at?” You can show them a visual hand model of Flipping your Lid and ask them to show you what part of their brain they are in. When we are escalated, verbal communication is the first to go. Using visuals can help you communicate with your child in an escalated moment and give them the tools to communicate with you if needed. 
-If you or your student are escalated, give each other time. Do not try to communicate and solve problems when your lid is flipped. Flipped Lids tend to flip other people’s lid as well and two flipped lids often lead to poor choices and more hurt feelings. Wait and cool off, use coping strategies and when you are both back to your thinking brains, communicate about the situation, choices that were made and consequences that may need to happen. 
-Model self regulation. Let your child know when you are feeling upset. Name your emotion and tell them you need time to cool off or model a coping strategy. Let them see you taking deep breaths or taking a moment for yourself. Model and practice coping strategies with them. When they are upset, ask them to breathe with you versus sending them away from you. When you use coping strategies, name them (I’m going to the gym because working out helps me regulate my body so I can stay in my Green Zone).
-Ask your child, “was that a good choice or a bad/poor choice?” Give your student an opportunity to take ownership, accountability and responsibility for what they’ve done so they can take control of how to repair the choice they’ve made. They may need some help in determining what that choice was or they may need time to figure it out. This can also help with accepting consequences as consequences result from a choice you’ve made versus a parent placing a consequence on you for no reason. It is important to have this same conversation for good consequences as well. Students can see that positive things happen to them when they’ve made good choices. 
-Hold firm to consequences. Each individual is responsible for the choices he/she makes, regardless of who pressured them or what emotion they were reacting from. It is important for students to understand the correlation between their choices and the consequences of those choices. Often restitution is your best bet: What happened, what choice did you make, how did that choice affect you and others (which can often clue you into if that was a good/bad choice) and how can you make this better? Making it better can often include apologizing, fixing something that was broken, doing something positive to counteract that choice (service activity) or a natural consequence (no coat = your cold). 

Learning to self regulate can be a lifelong skill and something that we all need practice with everyday. Helping your student learn these skills and supporting them through times of escalation can give them a better sense of control, feelings of empowerment and can bring you closer together. As always, everything is a learning process. Hopefully this can be a starting point for further conversation and skill building. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.