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Intervention to Strengthen Emotional Self-Regulation in Children with Emerging Mental Health Problems: Proximal Impact on School Behavior

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Abstract

A model for teaching children skills to strengthen emotional self-regulation is introduced, informed by the developmental concept of scaffolding. Adult modeling/instruction, role-play and in vivo coaching are tailored to children’s level of understanding and skill to promote use of skills in reallife contexts. Two-hundred twenty-six kindergarten—3rd grade children identified with elevated behavioral and social classroom problems from a population-based screening participated in a waitlisted randomized trial of the Rochester Resilience Project derived from this model. In 14 lessons with school-based mentors, children were taught a hierarchical set of skills: monitoring of emotions; selfcontrol/ reducing escalation of emotions; and maintaining control and regaining equilibrium. Mentors provided classroom reinforcement of skill use. Multi-level modeling accounting for the nesting of children in schools and classrooms showed the following effects at post-intervention: reduced problems rated by teachers in behavior control, peer social skills, shy-withdrawn and off-task behaviors (ES 0.31–0.47). Peer social skills improved for girls but not for boys. Children receiving the intervention had a 46% mean decrease in disciplinary referrals and a 43% decrease in suspensions during the 4-month intervention period. Limitations and future directions to promote skill transfer are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the families and staff of the Rochester City School District, in particular to our colleagues Gary Hewitt, Andrew MacGowan, and Gladys Pedraza-Burgos. We also thank Jason Barry, Karen Schmeelk-Cone, Michael Teisl and Jennifer West from the Resilience Project Team. We acknowledge support from the Center for Mental Health Services (SAMHSA) grant KD1-SM52964, the University of Rochester Medical Center-Project Believe, and National Institute of Mental Health grants R01MH40859, T32MH018911, and K23MH73615.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, NY, USA

    Peter A. Wyman & Wendi Cross

  2. Center for Family Studies, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA

    C. Hendricks Brown

  3. Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, NY, USA

    Qin Yu, Xin Tu & Shirley Eberly

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  1. Peter A. Wyman
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  2. Wendi Cross
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  3. C. Hendricks Brown
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  4. Qin Yu
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  5. Xin Tu
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  6. Shirley Eberly
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Correspondence to Peter A. Wyman.

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Wyman, P.A., Cross, W., Hendricks Brown, C. et al. Intervention to Strengthen Emotional Self-Regulation in Children with Emerging Mental Health Problems: Proximal Impact on School Behavior. J Abnorm Child Psychol 38, 707–720 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-010-9398-x

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