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We’re a Teen Residential Treatment Facility in Arizona & Idaho, offering support for teens and resources to help parents navigate their child’s challenges.
Seeing your teen’s emotions spiral can feel overwhelming. You want to help them find balance and feel more in control. In this guide, you’ll learn how to support your teen in developing self-regulation skills and managing strong emotions.
Key takeaways
- Emotional regulation helps teens manage feelings and reactions, especially during stress.
- Teens learn these skills best through supportive relationships and daily examples.
- The GLTT framework (Get Out, Let It Out, Think It Out, Take a Pause) gives teens simple steps to manage emotions in the moment.
- Parents can teach emotional regulation by modeling calm behavior, guiding reflection, and making space for open conversations.
- Practice matters more than perfection. These skills grow over time with care and patience.
What is emotional regulation?
Emotional regulation is shaping one’s feelings in the moment and choosing how to express them. It helps one influence how strong emotions feel, how long they last, and how one responds, especially in stressful situations.
When these skills are missing, teens may struggle with outbursts, mood swings, or self-harm, often linked to conditions like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), or depression. About one-third of teens in mental health care face these challenges.
That’s why learning emotion regulation isn’t just a life skill; it can also help prevent more serious emotional struggles later.
How to teach a teenager emotional regulation
Teenagers aren’t born knowing how to manage their emotions. They gradually build these skills by watching others cope, trying things out, and having supportive conversations with adults. The first step is creating a steady, trusting relationship where your teen feels safe to talk and learn.
Build a supportive foundation first
Before teens can learn how to manage emotions, they need a home where they feel supported and understood. Feeling safe with you gives them the confidence to try new ways of handling their feelings:
- Offer emotional support daily: Make space for their feelings, even when they seem confusing or intense. Say things like, “That sounds frustrating. Do you want to talk about it?”
- Create shared moments: Do something small together regularly, like making tea, playing games, or taking a walk. These calm moments open the door to deeper conversations.
- Keep your tone warm and accepting: Validate their emotions instead of minimizing or correcting them. “You’re allowed to feel overwhelmed. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you.”
- Balance freedom with guidance: Instead of telling them what to do, ask, “Do you want help figuring out how to handle this, or do you just want me to listen?”
Show them what emotional regulation looks like
Teens are always watching how you respond to stress. Use that to teach by example:
- Handle frustration properly: Stay composed when facing stress or conflict. Teens learn from seeing you take a calm pause or choose not to react with anger.
- Use language for feelings: Label your emotions calmly and clearly in everyday situations.
- Acknowledge your mistakes: If you snap, acknowledge it and try again with more patience.
Teach the GLTT framework for emotion regulation
The GLTT framework—Get Out, Let It Out, Think It Out, and Take a Pause—helps your child handle intense and negative emotions. Each part of the framework supports responding, not reacting, to their feelings.
It won’t always go smoothly, and that’s okay. These steps are meant to be practiced over time, not perfected overnight. The goal isn’t flawless self-control; it’s helping your teens gradually build confidence in their responses.
G – Get out
Help your teen understand when and how to remove themselves from an emotionally intense situation:
- Teach the purpose of taking space: Explain that stepping away isn’t avoidance but a healthy way to cool down and think clearly.
- Practice exit phrases: Teach and rehearse simple lines like “I need a break” or “I’ll talk when I’m calm.”
- Make a distraction list together: Brainstorm and write down easy activities, such as music or going outside, that help them reset.
- Identify calming spaces: Help them pick and prepare quiet spots, such as their room, a bathroom, or a park bench, they can go to when overwhelmed.
Role-play common situations where stepping out could help, such as walking away from a fight with a sibling or pausing during a heated text exchange. Reinforce that choosing to get out is a skill, not a weakness.
L – Let it out
Help your teen find safe ways to express strong emotions rather than bottling them up:
- Talk about healthy expression: Explain that emotions need to be expressed, but how they are expressed matters. Say, “It’s okay to feel angry, but it’s not okay to hurt someone because of it.”
- Create outlets together: Make a list of ways to release feelings, such as drawing, journaling, crying, punching a pillow, singing, or talking it out.
- Practice verbal expression: Encourage statements like “I’m really upset right now” or “I feel hurt when…” during calm conversations so they’re easier to use in distressed moments.
- Normalize physical release: Teach them that movement helps emotions move. Jumping jacks, running, dancing, or squeezing something soft can all help.
T – Think it out
Help your teen figure out what’s going on in their head. Teach them to:
- Identify thought traps: Help them notice patterns like “I always mess up” or “No one likes me.” Gently challenge those thoughts together.
- Introduce rethinking questions: Ask, “Is there another way to look at this?” or “What would you say to a friend who felt this way?”
- Connect thoughts and feelings: Show how thoughts affect feelings. If your teen thinks, “I messed up, and everyone noticed,” they’ll likely feel embarrassed. If they tell themselves, “It wasn’t perfect, but I tried,” they may feel more at ease.
- Practice perspective-taking: Encourage imagining how someone else might view the same situation or how they might feel a week from now.
T – Take a pause
Teach your teen how to stop themselves from reacting badly in an intense situation:
- Explain the power of pausing: Let them know that even a few seconds can help them choose how to respond instead of reacting on impulse.
- Practice pausing techniques: Teach them deep breathing, counting to ten, or stepping outside for one minute.
- Use reminders together: Create a shared signal, such as a hand on the chest or a keyword (“reset”), to use when either of you needs a moment.
Pausing helps your teen slow down enough to use the other GLTT skills, like thinking things through or stepping away calmly.
Make it part of everyday life
You can help your teen use GLTT skills by weaving them into everyday life when things are calm:
- Use real-life moments to practice: When they’re upset, gently say, “Do you need to get out, let it out, or think it out?”
- Reflect after the fact: Talk about a tough moment and which part of GLTT could have helped.
What real families say about emotion regulation training
Learning to regulate emotions takes repetition and support, and research backs up how meaningful this can be. In a 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry, teens and parents attended a seven-week program to build emotional regulation skills together.
After the training, 85.5% of teens said they had learned to recognize emotions more clearly, and 70.1% felt better able to manage their emotions.
These results show how consistently practicing emotional self-regulation skills, with adult support, can help teens better understand and handle their emotions.
Final thoughts
Helping your teen manage emotions doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s normal to feel unsure, overwhelmed, or even triggered. What matters most is staying present, maintaining the connection, and showing up for them. If you want to practice these skills with your teen, our guide on emotional regulation activities for teens can help. It offers simple, step-by-step ideas you can try together to build trust, understanding, and emotional strength.
Taking the next steps
Helping your child with emotional regulation often also means working on how you talk with each other and what they might feel underneath the emotional turmoil. These guides will help you keep supporting your teen as they build emotional regulation skills:
- Active listening skills — Learn to listen so your child feels heard and supported.
- How to talk to a teen who doesn’t want to talk — Learn how to open the door for conversations that can reduce emotional buildup.
- Teen anger issues — Understand how anger masks other emotions and how to guide better responses.
- Oppositional defiant disorder in teens — Recognize when persistent emotional struggles and defiance may need professional support.
- Teen loneliness — Explore how isolation can make emotional regulation harder and how to reconnect them socially.
Residential Treatment for Teens
If your teen often feels overwhelmed, shuts down, or reacts with intense emotions they can’t seem to manage, they may need more support than what’s possible at home.
Our residential program helps teens understand their feelings, learn coping skills, and practice healthy emotional responses.
We support families in our facilities in Arizona and Idaho.
Call for more information.
(855) 506-1906
Sources
- Larsson, K. H., & Zetterqvist, M. (2024). An emotion regulation skills training for adolescents and parents: perceptions and acceptability of methodological aspects. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1448529
- Moehler, E., Brunner, R., & Sharp, C. (2022). Editorial: Emotional dysregulation in children and adolescents. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9021591/
- Houck, C. D., Spiegel, B. S., Tong, Y., Rohan, K. J., & Spirito, A. (2016). An emotion regulation intervention to reduce risk behaviors among at-risk early adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 45(12), 2491–2505. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4697876/
- Gross, J. J. (Ed.). (2015). Handbook of emotion regulation (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Pedrini, L., Meloni, S., Lanfredi, M., & Rossi, R. (2022). School-based interventions to improve emotional regulation skills in adolescent students: A systematic review. Journal of Adolescence, 97(1), 1–16. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jad.12090