Shanker – defining self-regulation and self-control

One of the questions that we get asked most frequently is, “What exactly is self-regulation?” So we actually did a study on this and it turns out that there are 447 different definitions of self-regulation, yes and it’s no wonder that people are confused. 

In simplest terms what that refers to is how we manage stress, how we regulate the amount of energy and tension that we have and then recover from stress. There are all these hundreds of different definitions of self-regulation and what’s very interesting about them is how many of them are actually about self-control, not about self-regulation. It’s very easy for parents especially to be confused- what’s the difference between them? There’s a very simple guideline for how you’d distinguish between them, at least conceptually, and that is self-control is about inhibiting an impulse. But self-regulation is really about addressing and removing or preventing those impulses in the first place. The impulses themselves are invariably a result of heightened stress and so what we’re working on when we address self-regulation in a child is the various kinds of stresses that lead that child to become highly impulsive or to need to exercise self-control.    

So what we’ve learned from doing this over the years is that self-regulation is what makes self-control possible or in most cases unnecessary.