The Self-Reg Framework: The Prosocial Domain

The Prosocial Domain: supporting self-regulation across the five domains

Shanker Self-Reg® helps us consider self-regulation and stress across five interrelated domains: biological, emotion, cognitive, social and prosocial. In this blog we are going to explore the Prosocial Domain.

Stress in the Prosocial Domain is often tied to a child’s difficulty coping with other people’s stress. Signs of Prosocial Stress, can include difficulties sharing, telling the truth, understanding right and wrong, and more.

Let’s explore The Prosocial Domain further:

The crux of Self-Reg is that we are born with a brain that expects social engagement.
Antisocial behaviour in a child is not the norm.
Clearly there are biological mechanisms that, in the wrong circumstances, lead to antisocial behaviour.
Equally clearly, there are biological mechanisms that, in the right circumstances, lead to prosocial behaviour.
Instead of asking how you compel a child to behave prosocially, through a lens of self-regulation we ask: what sets a child on an antisocial path?
The answer lies in stress overload. Fight-or-flight shuts down digestion, cellular repair, immune system, and PFC systems that subserve mind-reading and communication.
Stress overload shuts down the very systems that enable us to experience “cognitive empathy”: not just being affected by, but aware of what someone else feels.
When social engagement shuts down, ancient systems run the show. Systems that predate the Social Brain relying on aggression or escape to deal with threat.
Some children are born susceptible to limbic arousal, or had experiences that kindled the limbic system. If the limbic system is hyperaroused, impulses intensify while social and self-awareness decline, The child can’t share, sympathize, or communicate. Someone else’s arousal is so stressful that it triggers fight-or-flight or freeze.
What is critical in such situations is how we respond to the child’s anxiety, which can manifest in acts of aggression.
Chastising a child for his lack of empathy, shouting when a child needs to be soothed, escalating when the child needs to down-regulate, can make things worse. Instead we have to do Self-Reg, on ourselves as well as with the child.
Early learning centres and schools provide us with the perfect opportunity, not just to explain, but also to model this behaviour for parents.