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An all-in-one emotional regulation kit. Help your child name what they feel — and model naming what you feel.

  • 6 feelings posters
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    Emotional Regulation in Early Childhood: How It Develops From Before Birth to Age Five

    Emotional Regulation in Early Childhood How It Develops From Before Birth to Age Five

    Children are not born knowing how to regulate their emotions any more than they are born knowing how to tie their shoes.

    Regulation is a developing capacity, shaped gradually through biology, experience, relationships, and practice. Its developmental story begins earlier than many of us realize.

    Before a baby takes a first breath, the brain and nervous system are already developing within a sensory and biological environment. A fetus experiences movement, rhythm, sound, and the physiological environment of the person carrying them.

    Research on prenatal learning suggests that fetuses can form memories for repeated auditory experiences, including aspects of speech and familiar sounds, although researchers continue to study the limits and mechanisms of this early learning.

    It is important to be precise about what this means. A fetus is not learning emotional literacy in the way a toddler will later learn to recognize frustration or a preschooler will learn to name disappointment. But development and learning are already underway, and the developing baby exists in continual biological and sensory relationship with the person carrying them.

    Emotional development begins before birth. So do relationship and learning.

    Birth changes the nature of that relationship. Interaction becomes increasingly reciprocal: a baby cries and an adult responds; eyes meet; voices answer; hunger is met with feeding; distress may be met with touch, movement, warmth, or a familiar voice. Through repeated 

    interactions like these, infants experience changes in arousal and distress in the presence of another person. The American Academy of Pediatrics describes early childhood as beginning before birth and emphasizes safe, stable, nurturing relationships as foundational to growth, learning, relationships, and school readiness. Harvard's Center on the Developing Child similarly describes responsive back-and-forth exchanges, often called serve-and-return interactions, as an important part of the developmental environment.

    Before Self-Regulation Comes Co-Regulation

    When adults ask a young child to “calm down,” it can be easy to overlook how many developing capacities are contained in that request. Regulation can require a child to manage arousal, redirect attention, tolerate frustration, inhibit an impulse, interpret what is happening, communicate a need, and select a response. These abilities are not fully formed in early childhood; they develop over time.

    Young children also do not build them in isolation.

    Co-regulation refers broadly to the support caregivers provide as children develop greater ability to manage emotions, attention, arousal, and behavior. In infancy, that support is extensive and often physical. Adults feed, hold, rock, reposition, reduce stimulation, establish routines, and respond to cues. With toddlers, co-regulation may include staying close through distress, offering simple language, redirecting, or holding a boundary while helping the child tolerate the disappointment it creates.

    Preschoolers can participate more actively by using words, identifying feelings, practicing strategies, solving problems, and repairing relationships, while still relying on adults when emotions exceed what they can manage independently.

    The balance changes as children develop, but there is no clean line between co-regulation and self-regulation. A four-year-old may use a regulation strategy successfully one day and struggle to access the same skill when tired, hungry, frightened, overstimulated, or deeply disappointed.

    Adults experience something similar: knowing a strategy does not guarantee that we can use it easily under stress. A useful way to understand the process is that adults provide regulatory support while children gradually develop greater capacity to participate in and eventually manage more of that process themselves.

    Emotional Regulation Does Not Mean Being Calm

    The language of regulation can easily become confused with compliance or emotional suppression. A child who is quiet is not necessarily regulated, and a child who is crying is not necessarily dysregulated.

    Regulation refers more broadly to how we respond to and manage internal and external demands. Emotions themselves are not evidence that regulation has failed; anger, sadness, fear, excitement, and disappointment are normal human experiences.

    An emotionally healthy child is therefore not a child who remains calm all the time. The same is true of emotional safety. An emotionally safe environment does not eliminate limits, conflict, frustration, disappointment, or strong feelings.

    A child can be furious that the answer is no while the answer remains no, and a child can cry when it is time to leave the playground while the family still leaves. Emotional safety means that a child can experience a feeling without the feeling costing them belonging, and that distinction changes how adults interpret behavior as well.

    Understanding Behavior in Developmental Context

    Toddlers and preschoolers can experience powerful emotions while the capacities required to manage those emotions are still developing.

    Frustration may sometimes look like throwing. Disappointment may become screaming. Overwhelm may result in hitting or retreating. Fear may look like refusal.

    Understanding the developmental context of behavior does not mean that every behavior is acceptable. Children still need boundaries, safety, and guidance. The difference is that adults can separate the legitimacy of the emotion from the limits placed on behavior. “You can be angry. I won't let you hit” holds both truths at once.

    This approach also invites a more useful kind of curiosity. Rather than asking only how to stop a behavior, adults can ask what happened before it, what the child may be communicating, whether the environment is exceeding the child≠s current capacity, and what skill or support may still be developing. That is not an argument against accountability. It is an argument for developmentally informed teaching.


    Emotional Language Helps Children Organize Experience

    Children experience emotional states long before they possess the language to describe them. Adults help create connections between those internal experiences and words: “You really wanted another turn.” “That surprised you.” “You're frustrated.” “You're sad Grandma left.” Harvard's Center on the Developing Child notes that naming what a young child is seeing, doing, or feeling can support important language connections even before the child can talk.

    Over time, emotional vocabulary can become more specific. A general sense of feeling “bad” can eventually be distinguished as disappointment, embarrassment, worry, jealousy, loneliness, frustration, or grief.

    The ability to differentiate and communicate emotional experiences gives children more information with which to understand themselves and interact with other people.

    This is why Generation Mindful makes a distinction between naming an emotion in order to control it and naming an emotion in order to understand it: We don't name it to tame it. We name it to feel it.

    The purpose of naming sadness is not to stop crying, and naming anger is not a technique for making anger disappear. Emotional language can instead help make experience understandable and communicable.

    Emotional Regulation Is Part of School Readiness

    Social-emotional development and academic learning are sometimes discussed as separate priorities. Development does not divide itself that neatly. Consider what a preschool or kindergarten classroom asks of a child: listen to another person, remember directions, wait, shift attention, tolerate frustration, enter a group, communicate needs, navigate conflict, persist when something is difficult, recover after a mistake, and adapt when plans change.

    Many of these demands involve developing executive-function and self-regulation capacities. Research has long connected self-regulation with school readiness, relationships, and academic success. Child Trends, for example, describes self-regulation as encompassing cognitive and social-emotional processes and notes its strong influence on school readiness and peer relationships.

    More recent SEL research has likewise found that well-implemented social and emotional learning programs can improve students' attitudes, relationships, academic achievement, and positive school-related behavior.

    This is one reason emotional development belongs in conversations about school readiness. A child's capacity to participate in learning is connected with attention, relationships, stress regulation, communication, and the ability to recover from frustration.

    Emotional learning is not separate from readiness to learn; it contributes to the capacities that make learning with other people possible.

    Regulation From Infancy Through Age Five

    The role adults play in regulation changes substantially across the first five years. During infancy, adults provide extensive external support. Babies communicate primarily through cries, facial expressions, movement, gaze, gestures, and other nonverbal cues. Responsive caregiving helps organize daily experiences of feeding, sleep, stimulation, comfort, and interaction.

    Toddlerhood brings rapidly increasing mobility, language, independence, and desire alongside still-developing impulse control and emotional regulation. A toddler may have very clear ideas about what they want while having limited capacity to tolerate what happens when reality conflicts with those wishes.

    During the preschool years, emotional vocabulary, communication, perspective-taking, and executive-function capacities continue to expand. Many children can begin participating more actively in regulation strategies and problem-solving, although the amount of support they need varies by child, situation, development, temperament, stress, and context.

    The developmental goal is not to move children toward independence as quickly as possible. It is to provide appropriate support while their capacity for independence grows. 

    Why Play Belongs in Emotional Development

    Young children learn through interaction, imitation, movement, sensory experience, stories, songs, routines, exploration, repetition, and play. The American Academy of Pediatrics describes developmentally appropriate play with caregivers and peers as an important context for social-emotional, cognitive, language, self-regulation, and executive-function development.

    Its clinical report on play, reaffirmed in 2025, also emphasizes that caregiver-infant interaction is among the earliest forms of play and that play supports the progression from dependence toward greater self-regulation.

    This makes play particularly well suited to emotional learning. Stories allow children to encounter feelings through characters. Pretend play creates opportunities to rehearse social and emotional situations. Songs and repeated routines make language familiar.

    Visual and tangible tools can make abstract emotional ideas more concrete. Real life then provides an ongoing laboratory for practice: a toy another child wants, a goodbye that 

    feels hard, a tower that falls, a limit a child dislikes, or a mistake that requires repair.
    Play-based emotional learning is not less meaningful because it is playful. In early childhood, play is one of the central ways development happens.

    We Do Not Have to Wait for Mastery to Begin Learning

    We already understand this principle in literacy. Adults speak to babies before babies can speak. We read to children before they can decode written words. We sing songs and play with sounds before anyone expects conventional reading. We provide experiences that precede mastery because those experiences are part of how development occurs.

    Emotional development can be understood in the same way. Before children can name feelings, adults can offer language. Before they can regulate independently, adults can co-regulate. Before children can explain repair, they can experience an adult acknowledging a mistake and reconnecting. Before they can tell us that emotions are safe, they can experience strong feelings while remaining in relationship.

    This is the developmental idea at the heart of emergent emotional literacy: the capacities involved in emotional understanding and regulation do not suddenly appear when a child reaches a particular age. They develop through years of relationships, experiences, language, play, practice, and growing biological capacity.

    The more useful question is not, “When is a child old enough to learn about emotions?” It is, “What experiences support healthy emotional development at this stage?”

    Key Scientific References

    American Academy of Pediatrics. Early Childhood and Early Relational Health (updated 2026). https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/early-childhood/

    American Academy of Pediatrics. Early Relational Health (updated 2026). https://www.aap.org/en/ patient-care/early-childhood/early-relational-health/

    Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Serve and Return: Back-and-Forth Exchanges. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/ key-concept/serveand-return/ Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2018; reaffirmed 2025).


    The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children. Pediatrics, 142(3), e20182058. https://doi.org/ 10.1542/peds.2018-2058 Arya, R., et al. (2023).


    The impact of sound stimulations during pregnancy on fetal learning: a systematic review. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ articles/PMC10116668/ Bandy, T., & Moore, K. A. (2010).


    Assessing Self-Regulation: A Guide for Out-of-School Time Program Practitioners. Child Trends. https:// www.childtrends.org/


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Classroom Calming Corners: Peaceful Spaces for Times of Transition. International Journal of the Whole Child, 9(2), 93–111.
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If you're already noticing how much of this starts at home, that's exactly the point. Tools like a feelings chart or the Time-In Toolkit are built to make these ideas tangible for little ones, giving them a hands-on way to practice naming what they feel before the meltdown, not just during it. So where does the science actually take us, and how do we put it into practice day to day? That's exactly what we dig into in Part 2, including the research behind SEL's measurable benefits and the tools we use at Generation Mindful to help families build this skill from birth. Sources Kindergarten social competence and outcomes at age 25. Jones, D. E., Greenberg, M., and Crowley, M. (2015). Early Social-Emotional Functioning and Public Health: The Relationship Between Kindergarten Social Competence and Future Wellness. American Journal of Public Health, 105(11), 2283–2290. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302630 (plain-language summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150729142152.htm) Naming feelings and the brain's alarm system. Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., and Way, B. M. (2007). Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. Preschool expulsion rates and racial disparity. Gilliam, W. S. (2005), Yale Child Study Center, and subsequent national analyses. CASEL and the five core SEL competencies. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Join us and receive positive parenting tools and support in your inbox each week.
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