Helping your child to regulate through movement
The benefits of exercise are well understood — it can have a positive impact on our physical and emotional health. Exercise can even make us happier.
How does movement improve our emotional regulation? The benefits of rhythmic, coordinated movement are well documented. Proprioception is the ability to sense the orientation of your body in your environment. Proprioceptive activities can help calm, organise and regulate the nervous system. The resulting sensations rarely overload the nervous system, and some sensations have both calming and alerting abilities depending upon the individual nervous system (Wilbarger, 1991).
Finding your child's rhythm
Everyone has their own level and pace of activity that helps them to feel better — your child is no different. They will let you know through their behaviour what is regulating for them, and what makes them too heightened (up-regulated) or too flat (down-regulated). Ideally, we want to keep them within their Window of Tolerance (Siegel, 2006) — where they are alert enough to do what they need to do, but not so heightened that they become super-excited or hyper-aroused and out of control.
Children who have experienced trauma can have a much smaller Window of Tolerance. Movement is one of the gentlest, most natural ways to widen it.
Activities you can do together
The list below offers suggestions for physical activities to help regulate your child's mood. Doing these with your child increases your opportunities for emotional connection. They can also help you to teach your child to regulate through doing it together — what we call co-regulation.
- Move to music — feel the rhythm of the beat and move along with it.
- Run, jog, march or walk at a regular pace.
- Bounce along to music while sitting on an exercise ball.
- Jump on a trampoline (to music if you like).
- Move on a swing — some children find the back-and-forth motion calming, others prefer side-to-side (nest swings are wonderful for this), or even a spinning motion.
- Swimming.
- Wheelbarrow walking.
- Silly animal walks.
- Hanging from monkey bars, a parent's hands, a climbing frame or trapeze bar.
- Heavy exercise — wall push-ups, jumping, tug of war.
- Gardening — digging, lifting and carrying while tidying the garden.
The most important part is to have fun together while doing it.
If you'd like to know more
If you want to know more about helping your child to regulate their emotions — whether you are a parent, carer or working with a child who finds this hard — get in touch.
Originally published by Sarah Lewis on LinkedIn, 8 May 2020. References: Wilbarger, P. (1991); Siegel, D. (2006). The concept of the Window of Tolerance has also been illustrated by the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM).