Emoji Emotional Regulation

🙂Emotional regulation can often be a challenge for children with speech and language impairments and children with disabilities in general.⁣

😌Typically developing children tend to show a reduced frequency of disruptive behaviours as they grow older because they acquire more language. Having a larger language repertoire allows them to “use their words” and helps them to regulate their emotions. However, if a child is nonverbal, has apraxia of speech, autism, DLD etc., then the behaviours may not decrease because they are still having a hard time expressing their thoughts, wants, and needs productively and effectively.⁣ Click here to read more on this topic and how it can be one of the reasons children with disabilities exhibit challenging behaviours.

😃Therefore, discussing emotions, how they feel to experience them, ways you can deal with them and why you might experience them can all aid in improving and developing children’s emotional regulation abilities. With school aged children, try and expand from just discussing simpler emotions (happy, sad) to labelling and explaining more complex emotions (jealous, frustrated, disappointed). Children often experience more complex emotions than their vocabulary can show for. ⁣

⁣☺️This activity is great for group or individual sessions or for parents to do at home. When beginning sessions print off some emojis and discuss with your students/kids. Give them some smaller ones and let them share what those emojis are feeling. Afterwards they can draw how they’re feeling and share that as well. With children with #autism work on discussing why we can tell the emojis are feeling that way (eyes, smile etc). ⁣

Another idea is to implement a discussion of the zones of regulation (see image below) by Leah Kuypers when discussing the emojis emotions and the children’s emotions. Click here for more information on the zones of regulation.