What is Emotion Regulation? A Guide to Building This Skill With Your Child or Teen
Expert Interview: Gina Dockery, LCSW, Director of Adolescent Program – Chicago
Interviewer: Britt Teasdale, Associate Director, Brand Management & Content
Here is the part that surprises most parents: emotion regulation is not a skill a child develops in therapy and brings home, resolved. It is something the whole family practices together, or struggles together, whether anyone realizes it or not.
Gina Dockery has spent nearly a decade watching that dynamic play out. A licensed clinical social worker and director of Compass Health Center’s adolescent program in Chicago, she started as a group therapist and has grown into one of the program’s directors over almost eight years. She now leads the after-school program, focused specifically on helping adolescents navigate the transition back to school. She’s one of the clinicians who gets the call when families feel stuck.
What she’s learned in that time is that the families who make the most progress tend to be the ones who stop treating emotion regulation as their child’s problem to solve, and start treating it as a shared practice.
“These are skills that we as adults need to use every day, too,” she told me. “Some of us use them without thinking, and some of us have to put more intention with them. But this is for everyone.”
I sat down with Dockery to talk through what emotion regulation actually means, how it develops differently in young children versus teenagers, and where families can realistically start, even if nobody in the house has ever named a feeling before breakfast.
Q&A
Britt Teasdale: Tell me about your background and what brought you to Compass.
Gina Dockery, LCSW: I got my bachelor’s in social work and then my master’s from the University of Illinois at Chicago. From there, I started working in PHP at Riveredge Hospital in Forest Park and then moved to Compass shortly after. I started as a group therapist in the adolescent program and have been here for almost eight years now, holding a variety of different roles: group therapist, associate director, and now one of the directors of the adolescent program. I also work specifically in the evening program, where I help kids and families navigate those transitions back to school.
Britt Teasdale: “Emotion regulation” has become something of a buzzword. Can you define what it actually means?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: It really is what it sounds like: managing and responding to emotions in a helpful or healthy way. What’s most important to understand is that it’s about responding versus reacting. It’s about taking time in those moments to respond to a situation rather than acting impulsively. It’s not about not feeling big emotions, you’re going to feel the full range. We just want you to be able to feel them in a way that feels more regulated, and to return to that baseline state more quickly and more safely, rather than getting stuck in those extreme highs and lows.
Britt Teasdale: Is this something only children in treatment need to work on, or does it apply to parents too?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: These skills are for anyone. They’re not just for a kid in a treatment center or a kid in therapy. These are skills that we as adults need to use every day. Some of us use them without thinking, and some of us have to put more intention with them. That idea, that this is for everyone and that it’s something people use together, is a really major part of it. The concept of co-regulation is central here. We model our behaviors after each other, just as any human does, and that’s a major piece of how emotion regulation actually develops.
Britt Teasdale: So is emotion regulation less of an individual skill and more of a family endeavor?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: It’s definitely a family endeavor. And I think one of the misconceptions is: my child doesn’t know how to regulate their emotions, so this is a problem they need to work through. What it’s really about is: how do we model regulation at home in a helpful way? How do we give our kids an environment where they feel like they can regulate? And how do we regulate alongside them? If we’re trying to have a conversation with our child and we’re not regulated ourselves, we’re not going to solve anything. So it really is something that everyone needs to practice together and practice repeatedly.
Britt Teasdale: In your nearly eight years at Compass, are you seeing more young people struggle with emotion regulation now than in previous years?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: I think it’s always been a constant in general. There’s always been a baseline level of kids struggling. But over the years, so many things in our environment have changed. COVID in 2020 was a major shift, and at Compass you can see in each program how it affected everyone differently. In our youngest child program, the parents of those kids were becoming parents or thinking about it right around that time, and that affects their own regulation. In our adolescent programs, kids were at a specific developmental stage when social progress was suddenly paused, and that makes it harder to move forward.
The increase over the last several years has been noticeable. And thinking about how our environment has changed more broadly, there are different school options now, kids can be more isolated on electronics, there are fewer mandatory social interactions. That really changes co-regulation too, because co-regulation isn’t just something that happens with your parents. It happens at school, with friends, in any interaction.
Britt Teasdale: What are the most common things that get in the way of emotion regulation for children and teens?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: There are a few main barriers. One is simply emotions feeling too overwhelming, without having seen others regulate in a way that feels helpful or without having someone to model off of. That can lead to feeling isolated in your experience.
When kids are younger, it tends to be more externalizing: emotions take over, they can’t handle it in their bodies, and they act out. That’s the behavior parents might call a tantrum or lashing out. As kids get older, one of the barriers becomes feeling more isolated in the experience, lacking decision-making skills, planning skills, and the ability to cope ahead. When we’re younger, we don’t have the language to identify our emotions. As we get older, we might have the language but not the skills.
Britt Teasdale: How do you tell the difference between a child who is genuinely overwhelmed and one who is acting out? Are those even the same thing?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: They are different, and they can take a long time to tell apart. That’s actually one of the hardest things for parents: figuring out what is a normal developmental phase and what signals a real need for support.
A big piece is recognizing what kids can and cannot control. If a child genuinely cannot slow down, cannot control how their body is reacting, and is not able to come back from that state, that looks like true overwhelm. Versus acting out in response to being told no once, and then regulating relatively quickly and moving on.
Patterns are the biggest thing to pay attention to in any child’s development. If every time you say no the reaction feels unmanageable, or every time your child has to go to school the mornings are extremely difficult, those patterns are telling you something. The question becomes: is this persistent and recurring? Or is this situational, with fairly quick recovery?
Britt Teasdale: How does limit testing factor in? That’s developmentally normal, right?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: Limit testing is so normal, and it looks a little different at each stage. When kids are younger, it might be being told no once and trying to negotiate. In adolescence, it might be a parent setting a curfew and a teenager staying out 30 minutes later to see what happens.
What matters is how we react in those moments, because our reactions really do define how our kids act moving forward. Consistency in our own regulation matters enormously. If our children see that we respond differently to the same behavior depending on the day, our reactions become just as unpredictable as theirs. And then they think: if my parent can act differently based on how they’re feeling, I can too.
Britt Teasdale: Can you walk me through what it looks like in practice? How does a parent respond to a young child in dysregulation versus a teenager?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: Let’s say you told your child no and they start throwing things, yelling, feeling really uncomfortable in their body. In that moment, the first thing is your tone of voice. If you start yelling too, that’s not going to help.
The other thing to recognize: you’re not going to solve the problem right then. It’s using a calm voice, pausing the conversation, and naming the behavior. “You throwing things in this moment is not going to get the problem solved. We’re going to take a five-minute break and come back to this.” Keep things time-bound. You might also be implementing skills alongside them in that moment, like deep breathing, or ways to help them come back into their body. The key is naming both the behavior and the emotion associated with it.
As kids get older, the approach shifts. If you’re noticing your teen has been shutting down, isolating, not going to school, distancing from peers, it becomes about behavior activation. One of the skills we talk about a lot at Compass is called opposite action: identifying your current emotion, the urge associated with it, and choosing to act in a more helpful way instead.
A classic example: if your teenager won’t get out of bed because they don’t want to go to school, the distance from lying in bed to sitting in a classroom feels enormous. Think about it from your own experience. How do you bridge that? You start small. Can you just take the covers off? Okay. Now can you put your feet on the floor? Good. Now can you walk to get breakfast? Break it down into steps that feel attainable, because they’re already overwhelmed. That’s what emotion regulation is really about: how do we make big things smaller?
Britt Teasdale: What about the parents in those moments? When a child is throwing things or a teen has completely shut down, what can a parent do to stay regulated themselves?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: First, recognize that no one is perfect and give yourself some grace. There’s no such thing as a perfect plan, and you’re not going to make all the right decisions. Some self-compassion in that moment goes a long way.
After that, check in with yourself. We have a skill at Compass called HALT: am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired? If you’re feeling any of those things, it’s only going to escalate your response to your child’s dysregulation. Identify your own state first. Then ask: can I safely engage with my child right now, or do I also need a break?
If your child is somewhere safe and you can step away for two minutes to regulate yourself before re-engaging, do that. Especially with older kids, it’s okay to say: “I’m going to take a five-minute break from this conversation and we’ll come back to it.” In doing that, you’re actually modeling exactly what you want them to be able to do.
I also want to name the repair piece, because I think it often gets overlooked. You might get through a difficult moment and look back thinking: I could have handled that differently. When that happens, it’s worth going back and having that conversation. What could I have done differently? What could we have both done differently? That reflection is part of the process too.
Britt Teasdale: If a family wants to start building these skills at home from scratch, where do they begin?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: Emotion identification is the first step in any emotion regulation work. You can’t regulate something you can’t identify. And for some kids, parents, and adults, that’s actually the hardest step, because you might be feeling so many emotions at once.
It can be as simple as getting an emotions wheel on your phone or printing one out and keeping it somewhere accessible. You ask your child to point to how they’re feeling. As they get older, that conversation gets more nuanced, but the starting point is the same.
If you’ve never had these conversations before, try starting small. Every morning at breakfast, everyone identifies one emotion they’re feeling, and you do it together. That’s the key: making it something everyone does, not just the child. It should feel like a normal part of your family’s conversation, not something that only gets pulled out during a crisis. We use these skills every day, whether we’re talking to a coworker, driving when someone cuts us off, or just getting through a hard morning. The goal is for skill use to feel like that, not like a crisis intervention.
Britt Teasdale: What are some other ways to weave emotion regulation into the daily routine?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: One thing I always come back to is coping ahead for situations you know will be hard. If you know your child has historically struggled with, say, soccer practice due to separation anxiety, don’t just show up and hope for the best. Have the prep conversation beforehand: “When I drop you off Saturday, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get your snack, you’re going to walk out with this person, and then we’ll go from there.” Make it as predictable as possible, because predictability reduces the overwhelm before it starts.
I also like the idea of a nightly reflection that doesn’t have to be a formal emotion check-in. It could be: one thing I learned today, and one behavior I noticed in myself. For younger kids, connecting behaviors to earned privileges helps make the link between actions and outcomes feel real. But keep the larger goal in mind: these conversations should be happening all the time, not just when someone is in trouble.
For younger kids, it might be building breathing techniques, body scans, or simple grounding exercises into a daily routine so they become second nature. As kids get older, small commitments go a long way. Maybe it’s: I’m going to spend ten minutes outside my room tonight. That’s the step. Not a full social reintegration, just ten minutes. Small and attainable.
Britt Teasdale: Is emotion regulation something we’re born with, or is it a skill everyone has to actively learn?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: We have to learn it and continue to practice it. And the best comparison I always use is motivation. We talk a lot at Compass about the idea that if you just woke up with motivation every day, life would be so much easier. But motivation doesn’t just arrive. It takes setting goals, building energy, having willingness. Emotion regulation is the same.
Some people may feel like they were born with it because it comes more naturally, maybe because of the environment they grew up in or the modeling they saw early on. But for some of us, we have to work harder at it. And that’s why it matters to recognize: this is not just something kids have to do. It’s something all of us have to work on.
Britt Teasdale: When should a parent start to wonder whether their child needs more support than what they can provide at home?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: There can sometimes be shame around this question, the feeling of: I should be able to handle this, I’m a parent. But recognizing when to seek extra support is actually one of the most important things a parent can do.
The clearest signal is when patterns are persistent and disrupting daily functioning. For a younger child, daily functioning looks like going to some version of school, playing with same-aged peers appropriately, and following home expectations to a reasonable degree. If those things are consistently breaking down, that’s when extra support becomes important.
As kids get older, the markers shift. Struggling to get to school consistently, disengaging from extracurriculars or activities that were previously expected, or a significant and sustained shift in behavior from what was once typical. That last one is really key: if your child was managing fairly consistently and then something clearly changed over time, that shift is worth paying attention to.
Don’t wait for things to get worse before you ask for help. Targeting behaviors earlier is always more helpful. Needing support at seven looks very different from needing support at seventeen, and both are valid.
Britt Teasdale: For families whose child ends up in a structured program like PHP or IOP, what does that actually look like day-to-day?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: We really try to simulate a typical environment. The group rooms function somewhat like classrooms: same-aged peers, structured activities, expectations around participation and sharing, similar to a school day. And sometimes the same things that trigger dysregulation at school or at home get triggered at Compass too. That’s actually helpful, because then we can coach kids through those moments in real time, with supports around them.
Every age group works on a skill every day. So every day, your child is learning something new that connects to the larger picture of how they function throughout the day. Let’s say the skill that day is grounding techniques, ways to bring yourself back into your body when you’re feeling overwhelmed. That day at Compass is focused on how to use that skill across different situations and how to take it home and practice it there.
The structure of an IOP or PHP matters because it offers consistency. Outpatient therapy is valuable, but the specific advantage of a structured program is that you learn something on Monday and come back Tuesday and replicate it. That repetition builds the pattern. And equally important: the treatment team is there to support not just the child, but the family too. We’re not the ones who go home with your kid. You are. So making sure parents and caregivers feel equipped is a core part of what we do.
Britt Teasdale: What does progress actually look like? How does a family know it’s working?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: There are a few markers. One is general symptom reduction. If a child’s baseline anxiety, on a scale of one to ten, has been sitting at an eight or nine for months, getting it down to a six or seven is progress. Not resolution, but progress.
We’re also looking at safety, stability, and functioning. If a child was having significant dysregulation three times a week to the point where parents found it unmanageable, getting that down to once a week or every other week is meaningful movement. We’re not saying emotions go away. We’re saying they become more manageable and more tolerable, and the child starts to feel like they have some control back.
School attendance is often one of the most concrete markers. If a child has been refusing school and going one or two days a week, getting to four days a week is significant. We’re not expecting perfection, and we’re not expecting linear movement either. Progress is not linear, and I think that’s really important for families to understand. It’s very common to start gaining support and feel, for a while, like things are actually getting harder. That’s because we’re targeting what’s difficult. But over time, the direction should be trending upward.
Britt Teasdale: For parents who are in the thick of it and things feel harder than expected, what do you want them to hear?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: First: it’s normal, even though it doesn’t feel normal. I recognize that hearing that in the moment isn’t always comforting, and I mean it anyway.
Second: you don’t have to do this alone. At Compass, we have parent groups almost every day of the week, whether for connecting with other parents going through the same thing or for learning skills alongside your child. I encourage any caregiver to have their own support system too, whether that’s a therapist, a trusted friend, or just someone who can be honest with you when you need it.
And third: if you’ve been using supports for a while and things still feel stuck, say something. Nobody knows you need more support if you don’t tell them. Honesty and transparency are huge parts of actually getting what you need.
Britt Teasdale: How does the approach need to shift for families with neurodivergent children or teens?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: The core principle stays the same: keep it simple. A common instinct is to give kids open-ended choice, “What would you like to do?” or “There are lots of options, you pick.” But for many neurodivergent kids, that level of openness can actually feel more overwhelming than helpful. It’s more effective to say: we can either go to the park or read a book. Which one?
In a more dysregulated moment, it’s even simpler. If your child has identified that deep breathing and jumping jacks both help them, don’t tell them to pick a skill. Say: “Do you want to try the breathing or the jumping jacks?” Or just do it alongside them at the same time.
We’re always trying to build flexibility in any child, neurotypical or neurodivergent. Things can’t always be all-or-nothing. Our brains function in so many different ways, and the goal is to pare things down to what feels attainable for your child specifically, rather than offering an overwhelming range of choices.
Britt Teasdale: Screens are everywhere now, even in classrooms. What are you seeing in terms of their impact on regulation, and what can parents realistically do?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: Screens are a tough battle, and I think it’s important to start by acknowledging that honestly. Kids are using screens at school, in extracurriculars, everywhere. Telling a child they’ll have no screen access just isn’t realistic the way it might have once been.
So the first question is: is your child someone who has typically uses screens to regulate? And if they are, how do you thoughtfully reduce that in a way that’s actually achievable? The example I use often in our adolescent program: let’s say your child is on the bus heading to school and their phone dies. If the screen was their only coping tool, what happens then? The goal is to make sure they have other tools available.
The other piece is being realistic with yourself about what limits you can actually set and maintain. If you set a limit you can’t consistently hold, don’t set it. Give yourself some compassion and find something more attainable. But if you do set a limit, like two hours of screen time and then the internet goes off, the work is tolerating the reaction that follows and staying consistent, rather than giving in. Going from no limits to a very firm one overnight isn’t realistic for anyone. Think about how to pare it down incrementally, so the change is actually sustainable for your family.
Britt Teasdale: I want to end on something you touched on earlier: shame. What do you want parents to understand about the role it plays in all of this?
Gina Dockery, LCSW: Shame and comparison can be a really dangerous combination. We have more access than ever to seeing how other people parent and how other children are developing. And when your child is struggling, that comparison can feel relentless. Their child goes to school every day or their child has all these friends. Why doesn’t mine?
The first thing I want parents to hear is: no family system is the same as yours. The factors you’re working through are your own, and every piece of your child’s story is specific to them. Comparing your inside to someone else’s outside is never going to move you forward.
And when your child has a hard day, or you do, that is not ten things going wrong. It’s one moment. What matters is how you move forward from it. If you keep rehashing the one time your child had a meltdown or the one time you lost your patience, no one makes progress. You give yourself grace, you reflect, you repair if there’s something to repair, and you keep going.
Self-compassion is something we talk about a lot, and it applies to parents as much as it applies to kids. You’re not just helping someone else regulate their emotions in these moments. You’re also managing your own, at the exact same time, in the exact same room.
About the Contributors
Gina Dockery, LCSW, Director, Adolescent Program, Compass Health Center – Chicago
Gina Dockery, LCSW, is the Director of the Adolescent Programs at Compass Health Center in Chicago, where she leads clinical programming and care for adolescents navigating complex mental health challenges. Since joining Compass in 2018, Gina has advanced from Adolescent Lead Group Therapist to Associate Director before stepping into her current directorship in 2023, bringing nearly a decade of experience across partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, and residential treatment settings, and specialized expertise in DBT, CBT, and ACT. She earned her MSW from the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois Chicago and her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Social Work from the University of Iowa.
Britt Teasdale, Associate Director, Brand Management & Content, Compass Health Center
Britt Teasdale is Associate Director of Brand & Content at Compass Health Center and co-host of You Only Know What You Know, Compass’s mental health podcast for parents and caregivers. With a background in journalism and creative nonfiction, Britt specializes in translating complex clinical insights into accessible, human-centered storytelling for families, clinicians, and communities.
