Two Categories of Self-Regulaion

The process of self-regulation has been divided into two categories: social emotional and cognitive self-regulation. Social emotional regulation enables children to follow social interactions in diverse settings. For example, we teach social emotional regulation when we teach our children not to say things such as,"Your outfit is ugly," or "I don't like your hair." When we teach our children not to say things like this we're teaching our children to follow social interactions in diverse settings. This teaches children that in these settings we don't say things like that because in social settings it's not appropriate to say things like that and teach the emotional regulation part of it because we teach children that saying things like that hurts other peoples feelings. It teaches self-regulation as children learn to regulate their impulses so that these types of comments are no longer said in public settings.

The second category of self-regulation is cognitive self-regulation. Cognitive self-regulation enables children to use thinking processes needed to solve problems and make decisions. Self-regulation plays a role in helping children interact and get along with others by following social standards of conduct and making decisions and solving problems that arise. For example, a child may need some soap to go take a bath but the soap is on a shelf they can't reach. Cognitive self-regulation helps a child either get a stool so they can reach it or ask a parent or older sibling for help instead of throwing a tantrum or not taking the bath because they can't reach the soap. The child has used 'the thinking process' to determine that the way to solve the problems is to either get a stool or ask for help and they have 'made a decision' as to which of those to do in order to solve the problem.

Cognitive self-regulation helps children interact and get along with others by following social standards of conduct and making decisions and solving problems that arise. For example, a child may be over at a friends house playing and cognitive self-regulation helps them determine that social standards of conduct dictate out that they both need to agree on what to play. It helps them solve problems that arise because the child can then talk with their friend about what to play instead of demanding that they play what they want to play. For example, one of the children may want to play a video game while the other wants to go outside and play basketball. Having and using cognitive self-regulation helps a child determine that in order to keep the friend that social standards of conduct and problems solving skills help them decide that a solution to the problem is to do one activity for a while and then do the other for a while or play something else entirely and be able to be all right with that and not be sad, mad etc about it.

This type of self-regulation is one of the hardest types of self-regulation to teach a child and takes lots of time and energy and patience to teach.