Addressing Emotion Regulation with Children: Play, Verbalization of Feelings, and Reappraisal

ABSTRACT

Emotion regulation difficulties are a central component of distress in childhood. The challenges children face in managing, understanding, and expressing difficult emotions can be addressed through a range of treatment approaches designed for school-aged children. Four therapies commonly used today – Child Centered Play Therapy, Mentalization Based Therapy for Children, Regulation Focused Therapy for Children, and Dialectic Behavior Therapy for Children – recognize the connection between behavior and emotion and the need to promote the child’s emotion regulation. In this paper we present a brief overview of each treatment and compare the ways in which they utilize play and employ reappraisal, a specific type of emotion regulation. Additionally, we highlight the centrality of verbalization of feelings across each of the four treatments. We propose that play, verbalization of feelings, and explicit and/or implicit reappraisal are common factors that promote emotion regulation in a wide range of psychotherapeutic approaches for children.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In fact, the work of John Gottman (Gottman et al., 1996) describes how parents’ own feelings and thoughts about their emotions are strongly related to or underlie the way they parent and how they impact their children’s capacity for ER.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leon Hoffman

Leon Hoffman, M.D., Pacella Research Center of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Center for Regulation Focused Psychotherapy.

Tracy A. Prout

Tracy A. Prout, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and Director of IMPACT Psychological Services, a group private practice with two locations in New York State. She is Director of Research at the Center for Regulation Focused Psychotherapy and has published dozens of papers on psychotherapy training, the mental health impacts of COVID-19, deliberate practice, psychodynamic psychotherapy and RFP-C specifically.

Timothy Rice

Timothy Rice, M.D. is a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in New York, NY. He is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Margo Bernstein

Margo Bernstein, Psy.D., provides child, adult and family therapy in her private practice in New York City. She is also adjunct professor at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, where she supervises doctoral students in child psychodynamic psychotherapy. She has published papers on topics such as Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for children and on treatment outcomes for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a non-invasive treatment for medication-resistant depression.