25/08/2025
Lets talk about 🟢🟡🔵🔴 Zones of Regulation. It is a common tool used in schools, recommended by professionals, and often seen in support plans. It can be a helpful way to support emotional understanding and regulation. However, from what I’ve seen, it’s appears to be used in an oversimplified way and as a tick-box exercise.
Research tells us Zones can be effective, particularly when used thoughtfully, with proper support and teaching. But often the intervention does not work because deeper understanding of the child's needs have not been investigated. Before starting with zones it's important to ask.....
●Has the user actually been taught the purpose and how to use it, not just shown a poster and asked to pick a colour? This includes things like understanding why silly and anxious are in the same zone, even though they may feel completely different.
●Have they been taught that there are no ‘bad’ zones. Each zone is just information about how they’re feeling, to help choose the right support strategy if needed?
●Do they understand what the different emotions look and feel like for them? We know that being neurodivergent can come with challenges in recognising and describing feelings?.
●Does this approach suit the users age, development, or emotional needs?
For many people, emotions aren’t neat, simple, or able to be colour-coded. Reducing lived experience to a chart can feel invalidating. It may encourage masking ( I will pick green because it is the only good one!) or leave deeper emotional needs unaddressed ( trauma for example can't be simply labled)
Once the user does learn to identify their feelings and use zones to communicate this, the next step matters just as much: How are they being supported to reduce triggers, understand themselves, and build meaningful coping strategies?
Zones can be a good starting point, but should never be the whole intervention. If you see this on your child's plan, its important to ask more questions as detailed above.
