Support children in the Early Years with self-regulation

Meet your hosts

Dr Mine Conkbayir, MBE

Consultant, lecturer, author, and trainer

Mine's PhD is in early childhood education and neuroscience and she has worked in early childhood education and care for over twenty years. She says that her key objective is to "bridge the gap between neuroscience and Early Years discourse and practice."

Ursula Krystek-Walton

Head of Early Years at Thrive Childcare and Education

Ursula is the Head of Early Years at Thrive Childcare and Education

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Self-regulation is a foundational framework for child development

Self-regulation is an essential foundation for children's emotional, social, and cognitive development, underpinning executive functioning and overall well-being and mental health. Self-regulation:

Cannot be reduced to a tick-box exercise
Is not the same as a child "behaving"
Requires a holistic understanding of the child across biological, emotional, social, pro-social, and cognitive areas.

No more "behaviour management" policies

Behaviour management practices, such as timeout and reward-punishment systems, do not work. But why?

They can be actively harmful to early brain development
They are ineffective at building lasting self-regulatory skills.
They address behaviour after the fact, without equipping children emotion regulation skills and tools to manage their emotions
They risk shaming and isolating children whose nervous systems are still developing.

Self-regulation needs co-regulation

Co-regulation is the adult's role in emotionally containing and supporting a child. Practitioners at Bertram Nursery Group restructured their policy to centre adult actions, renaming their behaviour management policy a "promoting self-regulation through co-regulation policy."

Practical strategies for embedding self-regulation in Early Years settings

It's a good idea for your setting to have a toolbox of ways to promote and support emotion regulation, including:

Self-regulation spaces or cosy zones, where children can retreat if they feel overwhelmed
Daily physical activity and movement
"Name it to tame it" emotion labelling
Deep breathing techniques
Emotion coaching.

These strategies were shown to reduce emotion dysregulation episodes and empower children to self-identify when they needed to recalibrate.

Sharing knowledge with educators and parents

Consistency is key. Effective implementation requires threading self-regulation principles through all policies, induction processes, staff supervision, and parent communications. A notable example involved a child prompting their parent to use breathing techniques at home, demonstrating the reach of embedded practice.

Early learning goals and self-regulation

Both Mine and Ursula expressed concern that the current Early Learning Goals (ELGs) for self-regulation are narrow, inaccurate, and set practitioners up to fail. The goals omit necessary co-regulation and the psychological dimensions of child development. How can educators deliver these outcomes without adequate training or accurate framing of what self-regulation truly involves?