08/11/2022
There is a difference between āself-regulation' and āself-control'. Despite so many parents seeing references to self-control on their 's report cards, one is often mistakenly confused with the other. And because a child needs self-regulation before they can exhibit self-control, it can be for a child when the latter is demanded in lieu of the former being developed.
Did you know there are 447 different uses of āself-regulationā in scientific literature from which 446 variations are about -control (Burman, Green, & Shanker, 2015). The two terms are somewhat convoluted, even throughout child development literature.
As Jeremy Burman, author of self-regulation research alongside renowned Dr Stuart Shanker, says, āWhen there are thousands of partially-conflicting studies, with new ones being published every day, you can't just 'read more.' You need to approach the subject in a different way." Recent research into self-regulation follows this line of reasoning, showing that the cognitive and physiological mechanisms involved in developing, experiencing and dealing with self-regulation issues are separate from those involving self-control.
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Self-control became a focus in psychological research largely due to the ādelay of gratificationā studies that began to appear in the late 1960s (Mischel, 2014; Mischel, Ebbesen, & Raskoff Zeiss, 1972). These studies showed that problems in self-control could be detected in children as young as four, and that these problems were associated with challenges in emotion-regulation and executive functions (Eisenberg et al., 1995; Blair & Razza, 2007; Diamond & Lee, 2011).
The self-control paradigm became dominant because of the longitudinal studies showing that the children identified at a young age as having poor self-control fared worse over the long run, both physically and academically, and had significantly higher rates of internalizing and externalizing disorders as young adults (Moffitt et al. 2011; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989). This research led many to conclude that children should be taught in primary school how to control their impulses (Schlam, Wilson, Shoda, Mischel, & Ayduk, 2013; Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, & Munro, 2007).
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In 1865, the father of modern physiology, Claude Bernard, inaugurated the scientific study of what came to be known as self-regulation. Bernard was interested in the mechanisms that enabled an organism to maintain a stable internal state in response to both internal and external āperturbations,ā what Walter Bradford Cannon (1932) later defined as āstressors.ā In its original psychophysiological sense, self-regulation refers to the way one recovers from the expenditure of energy required to deal with stressors.
In psychophysiology terms, self-regulation is a prerequisite for exercising self-control. An unstable internal state can lead to a limbic responseā fight-or-flight, or freeze (a primitive neural response to threat easily misconstrued as compliance)ā and impinge on the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain governing self-control (Porges, 2011; McEwen, 2007).
The more an individual is chronically hypo- or hyper-aroused because of excessive stress, the more readily that person goes into fight-or-flight, or freeze (Lillas & Turnbull, 2008). These fight, flight, and freeze limbic states suppress, and at times ābrake,ā the necessary mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex for the practice of self-control.
Learning 'self-regulation' involves:
š§ Learning how to monitor and manage your internal states;
š§ Understanding what it feels like to be calm and alert; and
š§ Learning to recognize when certain activities help you to return yourself to those states most easily, as well as what pulls you out of them.
As you can see, self-regulation is not self-control. In fact, self-regulation is what makes self-control possible.
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