03/06/2022
There is a difference between ‘self-regulation' and ‘self-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 “self-regulation” 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, “When 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.
🍬 SELF
Self-control became a focus in psychological research largely due to the “delay of gratification” 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).
🤱🏾 SELF
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 “perturbations,” what Walter Bradford Cannon (1932) later defined as “stressors.” 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 response— fight-or-flight, or freeze (a primitive neural response to threat easily misconstrued as compliance)— 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 “brake,” the necessary mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex for the practice of self-control.
Learning 'self-regulation' involves:
🧠 Learning how to monitor and manage your internal states;
🧠 Understanding what it feels like to be calm and alert; and
🧠 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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