Self-regulation: the five domains (2023)

VonStuart Shanker|January 23, 2018|self-registration blog|0 comments

Marco Das Shanker Self-Reg® for self-regulation: the five domains

• Self-regulation refers to the way a person deals with stress in all its forms and then recovers from expended energy.
• A person (child or adult) who is exposed to a lot of stress in the early years can develop a "triggered alarm system." This can mean that even relatively minor stressors can send them into a fight or flight or paralysis situation.
• A child who is chronicunder or over excitedas a result of excessive stress it enters more easilyFight or flight or freeze.
• Self-regulation helps us look at self-regulation and stress in five interrelated domains: biological, emotional, cognitive, social, and prosocial.
• Shanker Self-Reg® is a powerful way to understand stress and manage energy flow. Self-Reg is not a program, but a practical paradigm through which parents and teachers can better understand children's stress and improve self-regulation.five domains.

The Shanker-Method® is a five-step method to improve self-regulation in children, adolescents, youth and adults:

1. Read the signs of stress and readjust behavior
2. Recognize stressors
3. Reduce stress
4. Reflect: Increase Stress Awareness
5. Restore power

the biological domain

• A child's brain development has far-reaching implications for the early years and its impact on mental and physical health in the long term.
• By being regulated, the child develops the ability to self-regulate. Being regulated does not mean being managed.
• early childhood educatorsYou can learn to recognize a child's arousal states and regulate up and down his behavior to maintain optimal regulation.
• There are four neural mechanisms for coping with stress: (1) social engagement; (2) fight or flight (3) freezing and (4) dissociation. The brain uses the "hierarchy" to respond to threats. If one proves inadequate to deal with the current stress, the brain switches to the next. Social commitment is the goal.
• A child becomes chronically under or over excited when their central stress management system is overloaded and they lose their ability to recover.
• A chronically under- or over-excited child has difficulty staying focused and alert, which is the ideal state for learning.
• Chronically marginalized, hyperactive and/or aggressive children are not in some way “weak” or act intentionally. They experience too much stress to handle social engagement or their cognitive processes.
• We not only need to “reshape” children's behavior, but also their parenting style. Self-Reg was designed to do just that.

The domain of emotion

• Many children, especially younger ones, find it very difficult to "control, assess, and modify" their emotions.
• Using "left brain processes" like language and executive functions to regulate a child's emotions will not be effective if the child's left brain is "offline" because all that adrenaline is pumped out in the hyperarousal state.
• The more overwhelmed (overexcited) the child is, the less ability he has to "control, evaluate, and modify" his emotions.
• When a child is in a flooded state, parents and educators should help the child calm down, not try to force him to monitor, evaluate, and change his feelings.
• Children experience intense emotional reactions that can come on suddenly and feel catastrophic – all or nothing.
• It can be overwhelming for parents andearly childhood educatorswhen they fail to help a child calm down or cheer up.
• Sometimes a child becomes so overexcited or angry that nothing he says or does seems to help. This doesn't happen because a child's "brake mechanism" is broken, much less because she's "not trying hard enough," but because he's so excited that he can't hear what we're saying or doing.
• parents andearly childhood educatorsi need to calm down

The cognitive domain

Roots of attention in the cognitive domain

• Cognition refers to all the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge: things like attention, perception, memory, and problem solving.

• In this area, Self-Reg deals with the cognitive base of these processes: the so-called roots of attention.

• Attention affects both the body and the mind; The roots of the child's attention span can be strengthened.

• Sustained concentration imposes a high energy burden and cost on the child's autonomic nervous system.

• A child who is uncomfortable in a learning situation for whatever reason needs to concentrate more than a calm and alert child.

• Self-regulation problems in any of the other areas can seriously limit a child's ability to focus on a task.

• For some children, simply trying to sit still or suppress an impulse requires an enormous amount of energy, and they may not have enough left over to sustain attention.

• When we work on the roots of attention problems, we look at things like a child's ability to register and integrate different types of sensory information.

• Many children need our help to gradually reach the point where they can work calmly, with concentration and calmly independently.

• Many attention problems stem from sensory processing issues (auditory, visual, etc.) that can be subtle and easily overlooked.

• When a child has a processing problem, their inability to pay attention and focus is never due to a lack of motivation, but over time, a lack of motivation can develop.

The cognitive domain: supporting self-regulation in all five domains

• Various playful techniques can help us address the roots of attention; Above all, it can help us work on the child's self-regulation.

• A child's distractibility, impulsiveness, inability to listen, low frustration tolerance, and other challenging behaviors are the result of overarousal.

• The more stressed you become, the less able you are to focus on what you see or feel and anticipate what will happen next, increasing your stress and further distracting you.

• Closing off and concentrating are ways to block stress.

• Auto-Reg allows us to break the "arousal cycle" by keeping a child's stress level in a manageable range so we can teach him to deal with it himself.

• The better the child learns to recognize and reduce distracting stressors, the better he or she will recognize patterns in what used to be "growing and vibrant confusion."

To social area

• The problems in the social domain lie in the arousal generated by the system that serves as the child's first line of defense in coping with stress: the social engagement system.
• Forcing a child to work harder socially can make him even more tense and insecure in social situations.
• What we need to understand is what we can do to improve connection skills in children who find social interaction stressful.
• As a fight-or-flight response to social situations takes hold, the child avoids what he or she needs most when scared or frightened: the comforting presence of a caregiver or other children.
• When we go into fight or flight mode, it's about turning inward: the brain has become the so-called "survival brain."
• It is extremely difficult for children to communicate with words when they feel this way.
• In fight or flight mode, even the most innocuous social acts can be interpreted as a threat. These types of distortions are a sign that the child has entered a low energy/high voltage state. The child's immediate need must be met and caregivers must restore the child's sense of safety.
• “Threats” come in all shapes and sizes. Some threats are very easy to define. Sometimes the threat is simply a look, vocalization, gesture, movement, or alternatively, the absence of a look, vocalization, gesture, movement.
• When a child feels threatened, they may experience sympathetic (anger and aggression, flight or abandonment) or parasympathetic (withdrawal, paralysis) tides.
• A child feels overwhelmed by situations that are beyond his or her social skills and is likely to react aggressively or withdraw from such situations.
• The problem for this child may be that he cannot "read" other children's feelings on their faces or has difficulty understanding the twists and turns in conversations. They don't understand why what they said or did caused a fearful or angry reaction on the face of the child they were dealing with. Everyone in the group seems to be on the same page, except for her; everyone laughs at the joke except her.
• Children with social problems need to learn how to handle themselves in social situations because, first of all, they need to learn what they can do to feel safe.
• Nature's mechanism for socialization in theearly yearsand play

The prosocial domain

• The takeaway from self-regulation is that we are born with a brain that expects social engagement.
• Antisocial behavior in a child is not the norm.
• Clearly, there are biological mechanisms that lead to antisocial behavior under the wrong circumstances.
• Equally clear, there are biological mechanisms that lead to prosocial behavior under the right circumstances.
• Instead of asking how to get a child to behave prosocially, we ask through the lens of self-regulation: what drives a child down an antisocial path?
• The answer lies in stress overload: fighting or fighting shuts down digestion, cellular repair, the immune system, and the PFC systems that serve to read minds and communicate.

• Stress overload shuts down the very systems that allow us to experience "cognitive empathy": not just be affected by it, but be aware of what another person is feeling.
• When social engagement fails, the old systems run the show: systems that predate the social brain and rely on attack or flight to deal with threats.
• Some children are born vulnerable to limbic arousal or have had experiences that activate the limbic system. When the limbic system is overexcited, impulses increase while social awareness and self-awareness decrease. The child cannot share, empathize or communicate. Waking up the other is so stressful that it causes fight, flight or freeze.
• What is decisive in these situations is how we react to the child's fear, which can be expressed in the form of aggression.
• Blaming a child for their lack of empathy, yelling when a child needs reassurance, climbing when the child needs control can make the situation worse. Instead, we need to self-regulate, both in ourselves and in the child.
• Early childhood centers and schools offer us the perfect opportunity to not only explain this behavior, but also model it for parents.

Know more

Contact the MEHRIT Center at info@self-reg.ca or visit www.self-reg.ca for more information.

Dr. Stuart Shanker is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Psychology at York University. He is the founder and visionary of The MEHRIT Centre, Ltd. Stuart has worked as an early childhood development consultant for government organizations in Canada and the United States. He consulted and blogged in countries around the world.psychology today.