Navigating emotional regulation for neurodiverse children isn’t a one-size-fits-all journey. Each child experiences and processes emotions differently, making it crucial to adapt strategies that work with their unique needs. This blog explores key insights into supporting emotional regulation through understanding, empathy, and the dual pathways of bottom-up and top-down approaches.
Understanding the Basics: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Regulation
Effective emotional regulation relies on two interconnected pathways: bottom-up and top-down processes.
- Bottom-up Regulation focuses on calming the body’s automatic responses. When a child is overwhelmed—perhaps by sensory stimuli or a sudden change—their nervous system kicks into survival mode and the logical and rational parts of the brain become unavailable. Attempts to reason can further aggravate and escalate the child further. Working with the nervous system becomes the priority of reasoning using physical interventions such as deep breathing, sensory tools or calming spaces.
- Top-down Regulation engages the cognitive brain, empowering the child to reflect, plan, and manage emotions through thought processes. This is something we usually want to work on outside of a difficult moment, upskilling the child with tools and resources to be able to handle difficult situations. It can be done either before an incident to help them plan for an upcoming event, or after a difficult event to help the child reflect on how to handle a situation differently next time. Top-down strategies include teaching problem-solving skills, using visual schedules, and breaking tasks into manageable steps.
By addressing both pathways, caregivers can provide immediate relief while building long-term emotional resilience.
Aggression: A Window into Emotional Overwhelm
Aggression is often misunderstood, especially in autistic children. Often when parents see aggressive behaviours it’s hard to look past the ‘crime’ in the behaviour, and it often feels like the behaviour is intentional. This is where differentiating between reactive and proactive aggression is essential.
- Reactive Aggression is impulsive and tied to bottom-up processes, often triggered by intense emotional flooding or sensory overwhelm. In these moments, the brain’s survival system takes over, making reasoning ineffective. Working with the bottom-up approach is vital when dealing with reactive aggression.
- Proactive Aggression, on the other hand, involves top-down thinking. It’s goal-oriented behaviour used to achieve something, such as avoiding an unpleasant task. A child showing proactive aggression is usually quite coherent, what they’re saying makes sense, their behaviour is trying to get a result and you may notice they are able to change their behaviour in response to what’s happening, to achieve their desired result. Addressing proactive aggression requires teaching alternative communication methods and teaching alternative problem-solving skills before or after an event. The child is usually behaving this way because they simply don’t know another effective approach to getting what they want, so in the moment it can be helpful to show them another way and use reasoning to help them make a different choice. Give them options that speak to their self-interest.
Understanding the difference allows caregivers to tailor their response, building trust and reducing stress.
School Avoidance: Turning Barriers into Bridges
For some children, school feels impossible. While it might look like it school avoidance isn’t always because they don’t want to go, but because their nervous system perceives it as overwhelming or unsafe. This isn’t "school refusal"; it’s a state of “school can’t.”
- Sensory overload, rigid schedules, and social challenges can activate bottom-up survival responses. Simple changes, like offering sensory breaks or quiet spaces, can make the school environment more manageable.
- Top-down strategies, such as visual aids and collaborative planning, empower children to regain a sense of control. For example, breaking the morning routine into smaller steps or letting them choose between two tasks can significantly reduce stress.
- Understanding the different areas of school that are challenging to the child so you can tailor solutions that either solve or alleviate those challenges in a way that works for that child, is crucial.
By shifting the perspective from “How do we fix this behaviour?” to “What’s driving this response?”, caregivers and educators can address root causes and create a more supportive environment.
The Social Model of Disability: Building Neuro-Affirming Spaces
The social model of disability reminds us that challenges often arise not from the individual but from barriers in the environment. This shift in perspective is crucial when supporting neurodiverse children with emotional regulation.
A neuro-affirming approach focuses on removing barriers and celebrating differences. For instance:
- Providing noise-canceling headphones in loud spaces.
- Allowing flexible seating arrangements in classrooms.
- Using visual tools to aid communication and reduce anxiety.
- Getting to know the child’s strengths and leveraging them to encourage engagement and learning.
These accommodations not only aid in emotional regulation but also affirm the child’s unique strengths and identity.
Instead of focussing on what the child needs to change to regulate their emotions, the social model of disability looks at what needs to change in the child’s environment to help with their emotional regulation.
To understand what the child needs from a social disability perspective as well as how to be neuro-affirming while raising or educating a child, considerable thought from the PSC’s SUPER perspective is vital.
Practical Tips for Supporting Emotional Regulation
Here are some actionable strategies that blend bottom-up and top-down approaches:
- Understand THIS child by getting into detective mode. Why does this child feel this way? Why does it make sense that they’re behaving this way? We can’t provide solutions until we’re clear on the problem.
- Create predictability with visual schedules and consistent routines.
- Offer sensory supports like fidget tools, weighted blankets, or calming music.
- Validate their emotions by acknowledging their feelings without judgment.
- Collaborate on solutions by involving the child in decision-making.
- Focus on strengths and interests to build self-confidence and engagement which will reduce their need to mask who they are.
- Self-awareness of how you are contributing to the child’s emotions. It’s not always about the child having a problem dealing with life. Sometimes the parent or educator can have beliefs, expectations or judgements that contribute to how often and how much a child escalates emotionally, which may need to be changed.
- Allow time to reflect with the child on how we learn from challenges, do things better and plan for upcoming situations that may be unpredictable or difficult
A Journey, Not a Destination
Supporting emotional regulation is an ongoing process. Progress may come in small steps, but each step is meaningful. By combining bottom-up strategies to calm the body and top-down approaches to engage the mind, as well as looking at the whole child and their environment, caregivers and educators can create a supportive culture where neurodiverse children feel safe, valued, and capable of thriving.
Together, we can turn emotional challenges into opportunities for growth, connection, and resilience.
If you want to know more about our Autism Parenting Program or our training program for professionals ‘Inside Autism,’ reach out we would love to hear from you. Support@parentalstress.com.au