Evo Terra (Host): Welcome to Long Live Childhood, a pediatric health and wellness podcast presented by Rady Children's Health. I'm Evo Terra. And here to help us understand the big emotions that come with being a little kid is Dr. Micaela Thordarson, the Adolescent Intensive Outpatient Program Supervisor at Rady Children's Health. It's great to have you here, Micaela.

Micaela Thordarson, PhD: Thanks for having me.

Host: So, young children, like my seven-year-old granddaughter, often have really big emotional reactions to things. What's going on in her brain and her body when she's having a tantrum like that?

Micaela Thordarson, PhD: From an emotion science standpoint, one of the things that I love about being a psychologist is that I got to learn in detail what emotions are and why do we have these weird experiences. Emotions are essentially like a tiny toddler that lives inside of our brains that is giving us immediate information about the environment around us. There is another part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex, or the frontal lobe that is the last part of the brain to develop. And the emotion part of the brain and the prefrontal lobe work in opposition.

And so, essentially, the muscle that helps regulate the emotions is the last muscle to get strong in our brains. So, you have little kids who are toddlers themselves or slightly above toddler age who have this very well-developed emotion center of their brain because emotions are getting information from our environment to protect us and keep us safe, but also none of the regulation skills that are supposed to help us. And the reason why little kids don't need that much regulation in theory, is because we need emotions to be bigger, to keep us safe to react. Our bodies as little ones are not as good at controlling our environments, are not as big, strong, and fast. And so, emotions are often a lot bigger and a lot more reactive, because that's what our bodies need.

Host: What you're saying is I should stop trying to get her to read Kant to calm down and let go of things, right?

Micaela Thordarson, PhD: I mean, if you can make that happen, more power to you.

Host: That's good information. I wonder, I'm curious on your opinion about telling the difference between a typical tantrum that kids are going to have tantrums. And then, perhaps behaviors that are more red flags for something kind of serious.

Micaela Thordarson, PhD: Yeah. We look at that as like frequency and intensity. And we got to compare it to other kids with similar ages and similar kind of situations. So, I don't know if that's your first or only grandchild, but I imagine you also then have children. So, we all know that like a kid who's the oldest child or the only child is going to have a really different context of development compared to the third or fourth kid in a series of siblings.

So, we want to pay attention to not just all the other seven-year olds, but seven-year olds who are in similar types of situations. And then, is my kid having emotional reactions at the same general frequency, or when they happen, they only get as intense as other kids their age? For example, if I tell you that I have a child who is laying on the floor in the grocery store, screaming and crying, because I said No to the Lucky Charms, immediately you'd be like, "Well. Sure." Because probably you thought to yourself, "Well, clearly that's a five-year-old child." But if I told you that's a 10-year-old child, that would be a pretty big red flag. We don't see many 10-year-olds on the ground in public. And that's just part of that developmental process of like expressing ourselves and regulating particularly in social context.

But also, sometimes you've got kids, super calm, super happy. Generally, you know, getting along okay, but when they get mad or when they get sad, things break, they're hurting themselves or hurting other people because of the intensity of that expression. They're saying things that, after the fact, they have tremendous shame about, "I never should have said that. I never should have done that," and it's extreme. Those are the markers of, "Ooh, this is more than what a kid is expected to be expressing or experiencing."

Host: Also, shows you the power of Lucky Charms, right? I mean, don't underestimate. I lived on those, I think my teenage years for sure. I hear this term co-regulation a lot, and I'm not really sure exactly what it means and why it's so important before kids can self-regulate themselves.

Micaela Thordarson, PhD: Yeah. Well, thinking about the information about the brain, that a kid's brain is biologically not equipped to be very skilled at regulating their emotions. We talk about co-regulating, because for whatever reason in recent history, we have begun to notice that when an adult is also having big, intense emotions, it is even harder for a kid to regulate.

And in fact, because our brains are actually wired to be particularly attuned to each other, a kid will biologically be getting information. Remember the baby toddler in their brain, that emotion center is receiving information from their adults, from their siblings, from their teachers that's telling them things. And so if an adult is expressing a lot of emotion, in whatever way that the adult is expressing their emotion, because we all do it differently, the kid is picking up on that. And it's actually telling their emotion brain to get louder, "Oh my gosh. There is something we should be upset about." And so if I'm yelling, I do this sometimes with my dog, my dog will bark, and then I yell at my dog to start barking, and I'm like, "Cool. Now, we're both yelling. He's definitely going to calm down now."

And so, the concept of co-regulation is, number one, because it's a lot harder, almost impossible for a kid to calm down if their really important people around them are not calming. And then, on top of that, that's exactly how kids learn to regulate. You're their model. You're their first and foremost teacher, and they're watching you learning how to build that muscle of, "Okay, first we take a deep breath. You know, we're going to sit down and loosen our body up," right? Like, those kinds of steps that we all do. We're just talking about it more explicitly now as like co-regulation, but that's existed probably since the dawn of us.

Host: And that makes a lot of sense. Obviously, kids pick up everything that goes on around them and turn it right around onto it. In the moment, when a child is melting down, you got any practical things that parents and maybe even grandparents can do to help and things that might make things worse? And I know the first thing you're going to say is Lucky Charms helps everytime, but beyond that.

Micaela Thordarson, PhD: Unless you want to put Lucky Charms in the car and the backpack and every room of the house, perhaps only a temporary solution. I think probably the number one thing that I see caregivers of all sorts doing by accident, is that you've got a kid who's quite frankly in the process of escalating, but much less like fully erupting. Let's take my adorable child who's on the floor in the grocery store, and so many adults take that opportunity to continue to explain why you can't have Lucky Charms this week, because we already bought Cocoa Puffs. And if you eat too much sugar cereal, it's going to make you sick. First of all, not only is none of that being processed by the brain, because the louder emotions get, the more fuel is actually being redirected exclusively into the emotion center.

So, you might even have kids who don't remember things they do or say when they're highly emotional. They're not lying. The brain has taken energy away from our memory center and funneled it into the emotion center to really get its needs met. So, actively engaging with a kid who is either, I mean, ideally escalating, but or fully escalated is like adding fuel to the fire. You're not helping. But that's when we want to help. "Oh my gosh, this kid is so upset. I just want to help them understand why they can't have X, Y, Z." Well, they can't. Ideally, in the process of that escalation, we notice the shrieking, the cheeks are starting to get that cute red color, right? That's when we take a pause. And we say, "Hold on a second." For the littles in particular. "Have you eaten? Are you tired? Do you need to pee, right? Because nothing's getting processed if any of those things are on the table, right? If none of those are like at hand, then just, "Oh wait. Did you give treats to the cat last night when you went to bed?" Like a random distraction. Like, let's disengage for a second so they can regulate, calm down. And then, you can move forward with whatever it is, the activity, the conversation, the no. So, pause is the short version of that and quiet mouth. If the kid is freaking out, we just don't need to talk. We can just sit there, which is really hard.

Host: Yeah. I would love to say I'm doing all these things perfect. But I know I certainly am not and nobody's perfect. We keep on going. Okay. How does supporting this emotional regulation early in life impact the child's kind of long-term mental health and in their ability to create relationships and have good coping skills?

Micaela Thordarson, PhD: Yeah. I know this might sound like really dramatic, but it influences nearly every developmental trajectory of life. Kids who learn how to notice their emotions, and what they need to do about them are far better at building and maintaining healthy relationships, friendships, romantic relationships, work relationships, which then sets them up to be much more successful in their careers, in their abilities to achieve their goals. I mean, if you think about how many times a day we come across something that is frustrating, disappointing, anxiety-provoking, and it doesn't have to be huge. The problem is, is that if kids don't learn early on how to notice and regulate their emotions, then the way that their brains develop is that "My emotions don't make sense to me. I don't know what's happening when my brain is giving me inputs." And so, you see these kind of like haywire emotion systems where I have a meltdown crying fit at 37, because I hit a red light on my way to my doctor's appointment, or I want to punch someone at the office because they ate my leftovers from the fridge, right? Maybe I don't necessarily do that, right? Because that of course is a next level thing. But those are the kinds of things that we need our kids to be able to regulate. And as dramatic as it sounds, this formation time, like 10 and under, we're teaching kids to pay attention to their emotions and that it's something they can do something about. So, it's very empowering, which then sets them up for all sorts of healthy and successful experiences in their futures.

Host: Micaela, thank you so much for all of this information. It's been wonderful learning more about this with you. Thanks again.

Micaela Thordarson, PhD: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Host: Thank you for tuning into Long Live Childhood, a pediatric health and wellness podcast, brought to you by Rady Children's Health for more insightful conversations about kids' health and wellbeing. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. Together, we can help keep kids healthy, happy, and thriving. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider downloading, subscribing, rating, and reviewing Long Live Childhood on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, or Pandora. Your support truly means a lot. And thank you so much for joining us today. Until next time.