SELF-REGULATION AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS

Research from neuroscience and psychology over the past decade points to a core skill set that underlies adults’ ability to effectively parent and provide care.

In the quest to achieve greater impacts in professional development and parenting programmes, the early childhood field has increasingly been developing and testing new models that draw on the latest scientific advances in the understanding of development and behaviour across the life span.

A landmark article

by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child reviewed research to describe the core cognitive and socioemotional capabilities that adults need to succeed in parenting and the workplace. These capabilities, identified as self-regulation and executive functions, enable adults to plan, focus, have self-control, and be flexible.

The emerging science on self-regulation and executive function suggests the potential for new approaches to support parents and teachers go beyond providing information by including mechanisms for supporting adults’ development of core capabilities.

In prior models of parenting programmes, a focus on self-regulation or executive function might have been inadvertent, for example, asking parents to stay calm and redirect their children’s misbehaviour. That is, by asking parents to engage in behaviour that requires these skills, they might improve over time.

However, a programme designed with attention to develop parent’s core capabilities has a different emphasis. It recognises that staying calm might be the hardest part of a change in behaviour and that a parent might need to learn specific group of knowledge/strategies to remain calm during frustrating interactions. Thus, such programmes do not ask parents only to use the skill, they employ strategies to build the skills over time.

Resultingly, the Early Childhood Compendium (ECC) is designed to present the parenting tips in a non-prescriptive manner that are supported by evidence and self-care tips to motivate and enable parents to better plan, make decisions, problem-solve, and be more emotionally regulated and less reactive. The tips are supported with evidence presented as core findings that are relevant and appropriate to mould or change behaviours.

To enable parents to exercise their core capability “muscles”, tips are presented as sets to support learning cumulatively over time to build positive moments that promote healthy parent-child relationships across multiple everyday contexts.