Summary
The emotion regulation strategies that an individual tends to use is most likely the product of a long-term habit of employing said strategies to cope with certain situations. Like most habits, this one is also developed in the early stages of our life. Hence, the environment that we grow up in majorly determines the emotion regulation strategies we use. In my paper I shall be exploring how a turbulent emotional climate affects emotion regulation abilities in children and adolescents. Past research has mostly focused on the impacts and relations of caregivers towards emotional development. However, not a lot of research has focused on emotional development and hence emotion regulation abilities, due to interactions in the family system. (Blair et al. 2022) In my paper I will be exploring how the [turbulent] nature of these family interactions impacts the strategy by and extent to which a child/adolescent regulates their emotions. First, I will be defining emotion regulation in the context of children and their family climate. I will be supporting this definition with the unique predictor’s model by Fosco & Grych. Expanding on this model, I will set down a definition of emotional climate and turbulent emotional climate for the purpose of this specific paper. Finally, using the regulatory flexibility model I’ll detail the impact of turbulent emotional climates on the emotion regulation abilities of children and adolescents through different examples. The comprehension of these models and examples collaboratively has found that children and adolescents that grew up in a turbulent emotional climate are likely to have a limited repertoire. This means that they do not have easy access to different emotion regulation strategies and hence can not regulate emotions as effectively due to inability of adaptive regulation.