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Positive Behaviour

Promoting Positive Behaviour at Home

Part 1 - Emotional Regulation

This year at the Future Rehabilitation Centre, we have been working on building a positive behaviour support framework throughout the school. Positive behaviour support is a behaviour management system used to understand what maintains an individual’s challenging behaviour and consists of thinking about behaviour using a tiered approach. A main aim of Positive Behaviour Support at Tier 1 is to enhance the quality of life of our students by increasing their skills across a wide range of areas:

As part of our Tier 1 support, we have been explicitly teaching social and emotional wellbeing as a core component of our curriculum. Targeted opportunities are created for students to explore and understand feelings in themselves and others in a supported environment.  By increasing self-awareness, students are better able to manage their own emotions and can begin to help others.  As students recognise body clues, they learn strategies to help themselves relax and work towards regulating their own emotions.  Opportunities to build communication and social skills are also integral to the development of all students.

Parents can play a role in Positive Behaviour Support by using strategies to help foster their childrens’ emotional regulation.

Emotional regulation is the ability to understand and manage your behaviour and your reactions to feelings and the things happening around you.

Emotional responses can occur on three levels:

  • Neurophysiological and biochemical – bodily processes regulated by the autonomic nervous system: heart rate, blood flow, respiration etc. For example, a person who is angry that feels her heart race and her face redden.
  • Behavioural – emotions expressed through actions. For example, facial expressions, crying behaviours, withdrawal from interactions with others.
  • Cognitive – involves language (spoken, written or though) by which a person labels her feelings “I feel sad”.

(adapted from Carolyn Webster-Stratton, Ph.D)

As parents, you can also help to promote positive behaviour through understanding these different levels of emotional response and by working on feelings and emotions with your children at home.

Practical Tips:

  1. Provide clear rules to follow at home that will help your child to understand what behaviour you expect.
  2. Every day ask your child: “how are you feeling today?” Use verbal or visual prompts to help them to answer if required, for example, “are you happy or sad?” Show them pictures if needed.
  3. Play games with your child. Make silly faces that show you feeling happy, sad, angry and scared. Try to get your child to join in and copy the faces that you are making.
  4. Talk about your own feelings. Research suggests that children who use to learn emotional language have more control over their non-verbal emotional expressions, which in turn enhances the regulation of emotions themselves. For example, talk to your child about how you are feeling using simple feeling words (happy, sad, angry, scared). In this way, you will be showing your child how to cope with particular feelings.
  5. Help your child to find appropriate ways to react to difficult feelings. For example, if your child tends to hit out at others when angry, try to teach him to put his hands in his pockets when he begins to feel angry. Say things like “let’s relax”, “let’s count to 10” and “I can help you”.
  6. Watch movies and TV shows that have a particular focus on feelings. Ask your child: “what makes you feel angry/happy/sad/scared?” Pause reading or watching the show to ask your child “how do you think he/she feels right now?”Talk to your child about what you think your child may be feeling.  For example, if they are happy because they are enjoying an ice-cream with you at the mall comment on it and describe it – “it looks like you are feeling happy now because we are enjoying an ice-cream together” or “I see you are feeling sad – what happened?” 
  7. Talk about your own feelings. Research suggests that children who use to learn emotional language have more control over their non-verbal emotional expressions, which in turn enhances the regulation of emotions themselves. For example, talk to your child about how you are feeling using simple feeling words (happy, sad, angry, scared). In this way, you will be showing your child how to cope with particular feelings.
  8. Help your child to find appropriate ways to react to difficult feelings. For example, if your child tends to hit out at others when angry, try to teach him to put his hands in his pockets when he begins to feel angry. Say things like “let’s relax”, “let’s count to 10” and “I can help you”.
  9. Watch movies and TV shows that have a particular focus on feelings. Ask your child: “what makes you feel angry/happy/sad/scared?” Pause reading or watching the show to ask your child “how do you think he/she feels right now?” Examples of movies and TV shows to watch: Inside Out, Shrek, Finding Nemo, Despicable Me, Frozen, Maya the Bee, Curious George.

Examples of movies and TV shows to watch: Inside Out, Shrek, Finding Nemo, Despicable Me, Frozen, Maya the Bee, Curious George.

Students will also learn empathy from talking about other peoples’ feelings. Talking to your child about events that you see – For example,

A girl that is crying because she fell on the ground or

A boy that is sad because someone pushed him

Talking about events like these will make your child more aware of what other people may be feeling and may make them less likely to carry out challenging behaviour.

By carrying out some of these tips at home you will be helping to develop positive behaviour in a proactive way.