During the toddler stage, a child’s physical growth and motor development will slow down but there will be leaps in intellectual, social, and emotional changes.

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Toddlers need a lot of reassurance and support to help them understand the new feelings they start to experience. It is all part of the natural process of their emotional development. To foster this development, we play, we share, we read, we encourage and we empower the toddler to express their emotions so they can develop a heightened sense of emotional awareness.

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Toddlers become more aware of being an individual; they start to become more independent and want to do things on their own and in their own way - without anyone’s help. By the age of 3, they will have started to experience emotions like fear, embarrassment, empathy, envy, guilt and shame. During the toddler years, a child will also be about to embark on a big new emotion: frustration.

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Self-regulation is a very big emotional milestone. It is the ability to understand and manage behaviour and reactions to feelings and the things that happen around us.

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Self-regulation allows us to:

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• control reactions to emotions like frustration or excitement

• calm down after something exciting or upsetting

• focus on a task and re-focus

• control impulses, and

• learn behaviours that help us get along with other people

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As they develop, a child will start to follow simple rules even when you aren’t there. But at this age you can still expect that they might break rules in tricky situations, like when it’s hard to share a toy they really want.

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Here are some tips that will develop a toddler’s ability to self-regulate:

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• Lead by example – role model how to do a frustrating task without getting upset

• Talk about emotions with the child – probe why they did something and how they could have done it differently

• Praise self-control and patience when you see it

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​During this stage, your toddler is likely to:

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• become more aware of being an individual

• start to feel fear, embarrassment, empathy and envy

• begin to be more independent and want to do things without your help

• be able to wait their turn and control some emotions

• start to say how they feel

• get frustrated and cry, yell or hit out when they don’t get their way

• not understand why they can’t have what they want, when they want it

• be bossy about what they do want

• find it hard to stop playing or to change activities

• struggle to keep their frustration under control sometimes – you might see some tantrums