How to Support Children Through Their Emotions

It can feel frustrating, tiresome, or even worrying when children experience big emotions, especially in public. Knowing how best to navigate these situations can help alleviate your child’s stress as well as your own.

The first thing to know is that children do not have the same tools for emotional regulation that adults have. They can develop skills and be taught to do things like take deep breaths, but they don’t have the same functional understanding of emotional regulation or even why people emotionally regulate and are not feeling all of their emotions all the time. The development of emotional regulation happens at different times for different children, so if you have more than one child, this can happen on different timelines for all of them.

One way that helps every one of every age to emotionally regulate is having their needs met. This is why children are more likely to cry when hungry or tired. Making sure your child is getting enough of what they need is a good start to minimizing tantrums.

Start early by teaching your child about emotions. This can be done by identifying your own emotions, or the emotions of characters in books and movies. An example of this for young children could be “Look at this face, what emotion is this?” an example for slightly older children could be “Wow it looks like this character just got their toy taken by another character, how do you think they feel?”

Connect with your child and encourage your child to make connections with others. By having a strong connection, they will feel safer in describing and expressing their emotions to you. By encouraging connection and open communication, they are more likely to try to talk through their emotions, rather than resort to crying or screaming, because they know that they can get their needs met by speaking with you.

Stay calm and model good behavior for them. If you are shouting at your partner or your child, they are more likely to exhibit that behavior themselves. Children look to their parents to learn what to do. This is how they learn to speak by hearing their parents speak. This is true of emotions as well. If they see you handle your emotions through communication and empathy, they will try to act like you do. Sometimes this is hard, because life is stressful, and things affect us as people. So simply saying to your child, “Hey I’m feeling [enter emotion here] I am going to go into the other room for five minutes to think for a bit and help myself feel better,” this shows them that you also feel emotions like they do and shows them a coping strategy that they can use when they are feeling overwhelmed.

Role-play with your child. Act out emotional situations with dolls, stuffed animals, or anything like that. Show these objects acting in ways that you want them to do.

Praise good behavior. Punishments do not work as well as we may think they do. A punishment might push a child to turn inward with their emotions. They may avoid expressing emotions until they are at a breaking point. If, instead, each time they relax after a tantrum, you compliment them on calming down and telling you why they were upset, this can reward them for trying, and as time goes on, they will calm down quicker, remembering how you were proud of them.

Manage your expectations. Your child will still experience big emotions and will not always be sure of the best way to deal with them. Nobody is perfect, and a child is just learning social rules and what emotional regulation looks like, they will not get it right every time. Children need adult support more than the adults in their lives may realize. Providing consistent support and understanding that they are doing what they can will make them more likely to get better than if they feel like they can never reach the demands set for them.

There are many options out there for extra support. You can go to family therapy or even just give children books or shows where characters process their emotions around complicated situations that they can see as models to integrate into their own lives. Parenting is a hard job; you don’t have to do it on your own.

Citations

Rouse, M., & Martinez, A. (2025, March 3). How can we help kids with self-regulation?. Child Mind Institute. https://childmind.org/article/can-help-kids-self-regulation/

Weir, K. (2023, January 11). How to help kids understand and manage their emotions. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/topics/parenting/emotion-regulation