WHY MY CHILD?
“Where did we go wrong?”
“Is my child a psychopath?”
“When is my child going to grow out of this?”
Parents often feel mystified about why their child struggles so much. More often than not, the answer to why one child dysregulates more frequently and intensely than the next has to do with brain wiring. Children with more extreme forms of dysregulation typically have neurodevelopmental underpinnings to their struggles. In other words, the vulnerability is inborn.
Self-regulation requires psychological flexibility, impulse control, self-monitoring, and the ability to organize behavior in the service of a future goal. These skills are thought to reflect functioning in the prefrontal cortex and other brain areas. Sources of vulnerability to dysregulation can reflect temperament and inherited traits. For some children, premature birth, ADHD, or autism may be the primary drivers. Parents often wonder whether their child’s dysregulation is due to sensory processing issues. Yes, sensory sensitivities can be a part of the picture but it’s rare that sensory issues exist in isolation of other neurodevelopmental issues.
Other reasons for child emotion dysregulation can be anxiety, OCD, inadequate sleep, depression, adversity, or trauma. Each of these factors can cause a child to feel stressed and irritable, thereby lowering a child’s threshold for meltdowns. By identifying possible contributors, treatment can be fine tuned to a child’s specific needs.
Children grow in their ability to self-regulate as they develop. The prefrontal cortex continues to develop into the third decade. At the same time, children whose emotion dysregulation is outside of the bounds of typical child messiness are likely to experience ongoing problems with their emotions.
When it comes to neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities, it’s possible for us to identify children at-risk for ongoing emotional and behavior issues by the time they are toddlers or preschoolers. The earlier the identification, the better. High quality, targeted intervention can help to alter a child’s developmental trajectory in a positive way.
It’s rare that a child’s dysregulated behavior reflects a moral or character problem. Aggressive children are usually not budding psychopaths. As hard as their outbursts are on the family, it feels terrible to the child to experience intense emotional flooding. Irritability and emotion dysregulation in early childhood are more predictive of later depression and anxiety than of delinquent behavior. By understanding a child’s difficulties through a developmental lens, it becomes possible to better understand why a child dysregulates and how to help.
