The Codependency Kate Blog
How to Self Regulate
All unwanted behavior comes from unmet needs. If we don’t view it this way, people’s behavior becomes fixed in our minds as labels or unhelpful beliefs about them. Eventually, this prevents us from connecting in relationships—with others, with ourselves, and most importantly, in how we parent our children in a connected, effective way.
We have a brain and a heart. Sometimes, when we process things only with our brain—by intellectualizing or ruminating—we get caught in unhelpful cycles and beliefs. This is often just unprocessed, unregulated emotion. It’s important to get in touch with how we feel about things, to get to the root of a behavior so we can understand it and then change it.
We can think of it like a house with a top floor (the brain) and a bottom floor (the heart).
The Brain-Heart House
When we’re stuck in our heads, looping over a problem, we sleep thinking about it, we wake up thinking about it, we talk to our friends about it. Our top floor becomes foggy. Overthinking, ruminating, pathologizing—these are all behaviors that come from dysregulation. Overthinking is a form of dysregulation. If we only stay on that top floor, thinking about the behavior, we end up creating core beliefs—about the situation, about ourselves, or about someone else.
The solution is to actually acknowledge your emotion. To figure out what’s really going on for you underneath the surface.
I talk more about how to get in touch with unmet needs and feelings in my other post on the BEND method.
Let’s explore what this looks like with an example.
Last night, my one-year-old went to sleep around 7:00 p.m. and woke up around 9:30 p.m. My husband and I split the night shift, and I thought I’d just settle her and put her back to sleep. But that’s not what happened.
I sat there with her, hoping she’d fall back asleep—but an hour passed, and then another. She was still awake.
I noticed myself—my behavior, my reaction. At first, I was okay. I enjoy one-on-one time with her. It was actually nice. I was watching TV, lying in bed, enjoying the snuggles. I wasn’t feeling inconvenienced, and I didn’t have unmet needs in that moment.
But by 10:45… then 11:45… she still wasn’t sleeping. By this point, I was feeling angry and frustrated. She was fussy, crawling over me, and I found myself getting mad at her—thinking angry thoughts about her.
At the same time, I was trying to figure out her behavior. Is she teething? Does she have a stuffy nose? What is she needing? I was in problem-solving mode—something we’re quite good at as parents. We constantly try to meet our kids’ needs. But I noticed that I was spinning: What’s wrong? What’s wrong?
That’s a symptom of my dysregulation.
So I stopped and asked myself: What am I feeling?
I noticed frustration, anger, tiredness, and exhaustion. And that awareness was the shift. I realized my anger wasn’t about her—it was about my own unmet needs.
When we’re dysregulated, we don’t have cognitive access to this kind of insight. So we have to sit with it.
And then it clicked—on a feeling level, from a deeper, wiser place: She’s one year old. She can’t take care of herself. This isn’t about her. This is about me.
What do I need?
Do I need a snack? Do I need to use the bathroom?
So I shifted focus from her to me and started problem-solving around my needs. I realized I was worried about sleep because I had work in the morning. It all made sense. My husband’s shift was supposed to start at 2:00 a.m., but by then, I’d already been at it for four hours.
I had reached my limit. I needed rest. So, I woke him up. I went to sleep. She fell asleep right after. Problem solved. No harm done.
All was good.
I woke up the next day, had six hours of sleep, and felt happy.
Why did everything turn out okay? Because I looked at my behavior and asked,
“What am I feeling? What do I need?”
If we don’t view behaviors—our own or our kids’—in this way, they turn into beliefs. In my head, I might have decided, “She’s just difficult,” or “I’m a bad mom.”
Our unprocessed feelings become facts in our minds. But the point of processing them is to create space for problem-solving. That’s what gives us direction. It’s how we stay connected i
instead of disconnecting—from ourselves, from our kids, or from our partners.
Resolution only happens when we allow ourselves to feel. Not just intellectualize.
It’s not about saying, “I’m angry—must be my trauma.” It’s about noticing, “I’m angry. Why? What are my unmet needs?” and then sitting with that.
Moving from intellectualizing to processing means shifting from “Why?” to “What?”
– Why is intellectualizing.
– What are my needs? That’s processing.
It takes time and practice. But it’s the most important skill.
Parenting strategies are shifting as neuroscience brings the developing brain into clearer focus
Originally published: August 21, 2025 8:35am EDT by Nancy L. Weaver Professor of Behavioral Science, Saint Louis University for The Conversation
A friend offhandedly told me recently, “It’s so easy to get my daughter to behave after her birthday – there are so many new toys to take away when she’s bad!”
While there is certainly an appeal to such a powerful parenting hack, the truth is that there’s a pretty big downside to parenting with punishments.
For about the past two decades, scientists have been discovering more and more about the growing brain. This exploration of neurobiology has led to new types of trauma treatments, a deeper understanding of the nervous system and an appreciation of how environmental and genetic factors interact to shape a child’s behavior.
As the science has become increasingly actionable, more evidence-based strategies are spilling into parenting and educational programs. Research offers some useful guideposts for how parents and caregivers can change our adult ways to foster healthy child development.
It turns out that many old-school parenting and educational approaches based on outdated behavioral models are not effective, nor are they best-practice, particularly for the most vulnerable children.
Why old-school methods fall short
I don’t come to this view lightly. I’m a behavioral scientist and a professor of public health with degrees in mathematics and biostatistics. When my children were little, I read all the parenting books and applied a somewhat academic strategy to my job of parenting. I firmly endorsed conventional recommendations from authors and pediatricians: I dutifully sent my children to their rooms to think about their choices and dug in my heels to enforce consequences.
It wasn’t until my children reached middle school and high school ages that I began to see what my approach to discipline was costing us.
Parents and educators have long espoused principles gleaned from experiments by the 20th-century researcher B.F. Skinner, a behavioral psychologist who studied how rewards and punishments could change the behavior of rats, resulting in the classic carrot and stick, reward and discipline strategies. Simply put, rats that behaved the way the researchers wanted – by pressing a lever – were given a treat, and rats that did not were given a light shock.
These midcentury, rat-based experiments shaped a parenting approach that caught on in American culture and quickly became dogma. Generations of parents learned to use rewards such as sticker charts, trinkets or toys, or an extra bedtime story to reinforce the behaviors they hoped to see more of, and to use negative reinforcement such as timeouts and loss of privileges to reduce unwanted behaviors.
But beginning in the early 2000s, many high-profile authors began to theorize that these strategies were not only ineffective but also potentially harmful.
B.F. Skinner primarily studied rats and pigeons to see how animals learn and modify their behavior in response to different stimuli and consequences. Bettmann/Getty Images
The neuroscience of child behavior
We all have a built-in nervous system response that prepares us for “fight or flight” when we feel that our safety is threatened. When we sense danger for whatever reason, our heart beats faster, our palms sweat and our focus narrows. In these situations, our prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for rational decision-making and reasoning – is decommissioned while our body prepares to fend off the threat. It’s not until our threat response subsides that we can begin to think more clearly with our prefrontal cortex. This is particularly true for kids.
Unlike adults who have usually acquired some ability to regulate their nervous system states, a child has both an immature nervous system and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. A child may hit his friend with a toy truck because he’s unable to manage the scary feelings of being left out of the kickball game. He likely knows better, but in the face of this threat his survival brain responds with a “fight” response, and reasoning shuts down as his prefrontal cortex takes awhile to get “back online.” Because he is not yet able to verbalize his needs, caregivers need to interpret those needs by observing the behavior.
After coregulating with a calm adult – essentially syncing up with their nervous system – a young child is able to return to a calm state and then process any learning. Efforts to change a child’s behavior in a moment of stress, including by punishments and timeouts, miss an opportunity for developing emotional regulation skills and often prolong the distress.
The behaviorist models just don’t work very well for children. The growing understanding of children’s developing brains makes clear that punishing a child for a temper tantrum or for “misbehaving” by grabbing a toy from a classmate makes no more sense than lecturing a man in cardiac arrest about eating less sugar.
Neuroscience-informed parenting is more effective than traditional reprimands and builds trust, connection and emotional regulation. Halfpoint Images/Moment via Getty Images
Curiosity is the key to connection
Scientists and parenting experts have come a long way toward understanding how brain science can inform child-raising.
While researchers may not all agree on the most effective parenting style, there is general agreement that showing curiosity about kids’ feelings, behaviors, reactions and choices can help to guide parents’ approach during stressful times. Understanding more about why a child didn’t complete their math sheet, or why a toddler threw sand at their cousin, can support real learning.
Attuning with our children by understanding their nervous system responses helps kids feel a sense of safety, which then allows them to absorb feedback. Children who feel this connection and build these skills are much less likely to throw trucks.
For instance, when your child fusses for candy in the checkout line at the grocery store, instead of taking away the afternoon trip to the park, try this instead:
Stay grounded. A deep breath and a pause signals to your own nervous system to be calmer, which allows you to coregulate with a fussing child.
Be available. Staying close gives your child the support they need to weather the difficult emotion. Validating a child’s experience can go a long way toward helping them reset to a more regulated state.
Hold a boundary. By not giving in to the candy purchase, you help your child practice how to handle the emotion of anger and disappointment – called “distress tolerance” – with your support.
Reflect on the circumstances. After everyone is calmer, you can talk about that experience and also notice the circumstances. Was your child hungry or tired, or perhaps upset about something from their day?
Parenting with the understanding of a child’s developing brain is much more effective in shaping children’s behavior and paves the way for emotional growth for everyone, as well as stronger parent-child relationships, which are enormously protective.
And that definitely feels better than taking away their birthday presents.