ABSTRACT
All children need their parents to be ‘emotional regulators’. This means that they need their parents to help them with big feelings such as rage, frustration, separation distress. They need their parents to soothe their distress, to provide empathic listening when needed, to help the child make sense of what is happening and has happened to them in their lives for better or worse and to enable them to manage conflict with siblings and peers well. In other words, a key parental role is to help the child in states of intense emotional dysregulation to move back to emotional regulation and so a feeling of well-being.
