How many times have you had to deal with an unexpected tantrum when you call your child away from a game or watching TV to come to the table and eat dinner? A not uncommon scenario I am sure in many homes.
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Transitions can be difficult for young children, and particularly so when they are tired at the end of the day. It takes time for the brain and emotions to adjust to a change, and young children need time to learn the emotional regulation skills needed to react to a sudden change – to them a change feels as if it is the end of the world - not having time to put the last block on the tower, or see the final credits of their TV show is totally catastrophic!
What this means is that we should be willing to provide some simple support to prepare children for change – it makes our lives very much easier and it helps children learn the skills to manage change. Firstly it is useful to talk to children about what is going to happen soon. A five minute reminder: “In a few minutes I’m going to ask you to pack up and go and wash your hands for dinner. You can leave the tower and finish it after lunch.”
Simple routines also provide children with a sense of predictability.
However, young children have very little understanding of time so even when those few minutes have passed you might have a tantrum, so a warning alone is often not enough. We can help children by offering some routine ways to mark time. You might play a particular song and the end of the song marks the time to stop playing. You might use a timer and show the child how the marker moves closer and closer to the end. The old fashioned sand (egg) timers can be useful here as the child can see the sand trickling from the top to the lower bulb and knows when the top is empty then it’s time to move on.
These strategies offer children ways of marking time and help them interpret the warning you have given and prepare themselves for the upcoming change.
Simple routines also provide children with a sense of predictability. If your children know that after dinner they have a bath, then a cuddle and a story then hop into bed, these transitions are easier for them – they are familiar experiences and with familiarity comes a sense of safety.
Children learn to regulate their emotions when we provide the supports that show them how to do this. Without our supports our young children are likely to grow into teenagers who operate at the absolute extremes of emotions: anger is total, uncontrollable fury, happiness is overwhelming ecstasy. Providing structure and support to manage difficult emotional transitions shows young children that emotions can be managed and here are the strategies we can all use to do it.
We expect that preschool aged children are in the process of learning to regulate their emotions. Sometimes they manage and sometimes they don’t, but with our support they are increasingly successful. Regulation emotions means that four to five-year-old children are able to play with peers, and (generally) not dissolve into emotional messes when a peer contradicts them, breaks the rules of the game or runs off to play with another.
By the time children are primary school-aged, we expect them to manage to regulate their emotions pretty much all the time, perhaps with a few spectacular failures. These milestones are totally dependent on the support children receive in their early years of life from us; children learn to regulate their emotions from our behaviour.
When children are highly emotional we need to offer calming strategies, then think about what caused these high emotions and figure out how we can prepare children ahead of time to manage these situations differently. Managing transitions effectively is a start.