Validating, Implementing and Generalising the Conscious Control Curriculum to Teach Emotional Self-Regulation Skills to Children with Challenging Behaviours

Developing conscious control and self-regulation skills in the early years has been shown to be an important factor in child development, although there has been limited application of cognitive strategy approaches with young children in both clinical and non-clinical settings. This study investigated the efficacy of a program entitled the Conscious Control Curriculum (the 3Cs), designed to teach emotional self-regulation skills and conscious control strategies to young children. The study included five case studies involving 21 participants: five children, who were aged between 3 and 4 years as well as their parents and educators. The investigation was broken into three components: the first was a validation component of the clinical use of the 3Cs with children and their families. The second was a generalisation component where the 3Cs was extended to include the child’s early childhood education and care (ECEC) setting. Finally, the study focused on the sustainability of the effects of the curriculum and maintaining positive changes over time. The results indicate that while children’s performance was variable in all phases of the study, they all improved over the 16 weeks as documented by their caregivers in both the home and ECEC setting. Furthermore, the children were cognisant and recognised positive improvements in their conduct, similar to that of their caregivers’ ratings of them. The mothers’ self-ratings increased the most over time, followed by their fathers’ and then educators’. The research findings contribute to the field of ECEC and emotional self-regulation with young children (i.e., 3-5 years). The results demonstrated that the 3Cs improved children’s behaviour and the feedback by participants about the use of the curriculum was overwhelmingly positive.