A Regulation Equation: How Playhood Nurtures Conditions for Connection & Executive Functioning.

Social-emotional learning was revealed to be UK parents’ top expectation for their child’s early education in our nationwide research last year (OnDevice, Oct ‘23). It has become a critical area for partnership between families and educators at Playhood, a family community where the nursery school is adjacent to co-working space for parents. “Supporting children to manage emotions” is part of EYFS guidance for all settings. Greater appreciation about how the brain works has transformed understanding of what used to be considered ‘bad behaviour’ and proven the ineffectiveness of punitive discipline. A well-behaved child isn’t necessarily regulating effectively! So how can adults and children pursue this (lifelong) journey together more harmoniously?

Jennifer Sau is an Associate Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in their Early Childhood Studies and Masters in Education programmes. She has 11 years classroom teaching and management experience at a Montessori school in Beijing and also spent almost a year as a Montessori guide at Playhood. Last year Jen completed post-graduate research here for her dissertation looking at Emotion Regulation in Montessori settings. We recently talked to her about reflections on the advantages this approach provides for practitioners.

Playhood: ‘Emotional regulation’ is a phrase that’s risen to prominence in parenting books, accounts, and circles. How might we define the idea and its potential?

Jen: “In the simplest terms, emotion regulation is the ability to manage one’s emotions. It’s more than ‘self-help’ as it maybe used to be called, and a subset of self-awareness Self-awareness is important for every single part of our lives, and many of us didn’t have great co-regulation growing up. We want what’s best for children and we want the next generation to do better than we have done. And now we have more information and resources to help in this area!”

🧭 “Inner discipline… that becomes a compass for action.”

“We really can't talk about emotion regulation of children without talking about our own emotion regulation  and it’s important for children to see that as adults we are always working on improving these skills. It’s natural to want to find reasons for things going wrong but it’s hard work to look at yourself and not have all the answers!”

P: In your research exploring emotion regulation in Montessori, what dynamics seemed specific to Playhood and did anything seem potentially interesting for parents and other settings?

J: “Playhood is a unique setting. In Montessori philosophy, order and reflection are so important. Practitioners are very aware of their own ‘state’ and are able to pause, hang back. Then they need to be open enough to discuss this with their colleagues. Jointly reflecting on what’s going on with a particular child in a particular moment takes a lot of trust and respect. It can take years to build a good relationship with lead teacher or  manager and I have seen some settings that don’t have a culture of people speaking up, sharing their views and opinions with one another, turning to one another for support, you know, asking for it and offering it.

But coming into Playhood, this was already there. No judgment, just openness and acknowledgement. You can maintain professional relationships and boundaries, I am not saying everyone has to overshare or to be best buddies, I am saying you can just get to good ways of working more quickly.”

“When Guides are tuned-into themselves and able to be honest about where they’re at, you have a work environment that’s safe and supportive. Having that kind of mutual respect shown daily is deep and is such a good model for the children. It’s not like getting feedback at your annual review; it’s part of the optimal prepared self and prepared environment each morning… I called this ‘The Emotionally Favourable Environment’ in the paper.” — Jen Sau, researcher.

P: Staying on the topic of the adult, you talk eloquently about “teamwork and cooperation between caregivers”, in particular turn-taking, as contributing towards everyone’s emotion regulation.

J: “This empathy and communication, this gold standard of support for emotional regulation, it all sounds utopian, right? But it’s about the type of connection. It’s about supporting one another through challenges encountered, having a space to be open and honest, but also about empowerment – supporting one another so nobody consistently lives in a state that none of us enjoy. Often the hard part is coming together with solutions in the face of what can feel like impossible challenges. As practitioners we need to remember that children come first, I think we have a responsibility to remind ourselves and one another why we do what we do, and that we’re role models for the children in our settings.”

“The very worst thing that can happen in any setting is when  educators and staff come together to vent and moan just for the sake of venting and moaning. It is healthy to express those feelings because we are human, but I think we also have to ask, ‘And now what? Or, then what needs to happen?’ Working with children is hard, tiring, all too often undervalued and underpaid (in the UK context), with so much paperwork, and people can lose sight of why they do it. For example, working with parents is an area of frustration in many settings. It can feel risky to share what’s really going on.”

“My big hope would be that the research I did might help management teams think about prioritising what it takes to build a meaningful eye-level relationship with each child. Placing that goal above ticklists and activities mandated for all the children requires freeing-up that time to understand their triggers and having honest discussions with parents.”

Coming together as families and educators to be responsive to each child’s unique needs.

💬 “Within this research setting it was particularly helpful that there were so many different means of communication available to parents and Guides, including shared daily lunch, brief communication during drop-off and pick-up, weekly feedback through WhatsApp, weekly shared observations though an online platform, and planned conversations.” (*Jennifer Sau, Postgraduate Major Project, page 25).

P: Can you describe a bit more about how you explored the topic of emotion regulation in the setting?

J: “My research methods included having ongoing ‘collaborative conversations’ (as opposed to unilateral ‘interviews’, and a great approach I used thanks to my research supervisor) with parents, alongside notebooks Guides used to jot down anecdotes or emerging thoughts and reflections about emotion regulation and dysregulation (themselves or the children). We spent lots of time discussing this. It was pretty seamless as there’s already a lot of back and forth and a lot of documenting here anyway! The collaborative conversations felt natural in Playhood since there was already an existing culture of sharing among parents and staff. It would be really interesting to track longer term how exactly these forums for discussion inform and guide co-regulation and support the parents’ own regulation over time, but that wasn’t the remit of this study.”

🏡 “This study found that co-regulation using empowering language and concrete comfort in a manner that is tailored to the child helps them to build a unique ER toolkit. This is further supported by parents who shared how children accessed their ER toolkit at home, often through outward expressions, language, self-soothing strategies and role-play”. (Jennifer Sau, Postgraduate Major Project, page 31.)

“The parents at Playhood are talking constantly about issues around regulation at home and on weekends, with the Guides, and also with each other. There’s so much common strategy and language. Maybe the parents here already have a greater level of awareness coming in, maybe that’s part of choosing Playhood, but also they are guided and supported through a very gentle settling-in process and have so much coaching to benefit from”.

P: Thinking about this investment of time you argue for, there’s a challenge to rationalise ‘slow pedagogy’, to centre everything on loving human connection, and to prove the power of community, and that’s the near-impossibility of tangibly measuring what we are talking about! We don’t need yet more pressure to track and report, and yet… it would be so valuable to understand the journey of the children (um, and adults too!) through developing and then mastering emotion regulation skills.

J: “There certainly isn’t a magical formula or perfect model for this, largely because it is an ongoing project and unlikely to be consistent, but importantly because everyone’s starting points are different. Different experiences in the home environment; different personalities. So we cannot start making comparisons. But we can learn from one another by actively listening to everyone’s experiences.”

P: Commentators like Jessica Winter recently have critiqued the self-reg discourse for being inequitable for those experiencing systemic causes of stress (like poverty and racism), so that’s a really important point. The question should therefore be what are settings doing to lower the barriers for all families to build their own regulation toolkits? There can be liberation in the acknowledgement you talked about earlier with co-workers’ openness.

J: “It is a starting point at least. Better leadership and training can definitely support practitioners in this space. Thinking through the admissions process is important. Do those people in admin really understand the classroom culture and how to ensure the school is a good fit for prospective parents they’re speaking to? Getting to know everyone’s context and expectations is important for children to be best supported.”

P: Any final thoughts emerging from our conversation?

J: “Something for further research I’d like to do would be moving the conversation from that self-awareness to shared-awareness by the teachers and parents. Another area would be following-up with older children, for example 7 year olds, who’ve built-up those toolkits. I am really interested in ‘metacognitive’ emotion regulation - how this occurs with understanding of the process, appreciation of the skills. That’s a powerful long-term metric of the work; emotional intelligence.”

Thank you, Jen. Looking forward to more collaboration in future!

Relationships and regulation - is there anything more important?