By Barbara Wilder-Smith, Elena Bodrova, and Deborah J. Leong

A Bridge to Lifelong Learning

While many skills help children transition smoothly from preschool to kindergarten, self-regulation, or the ability to manage one’s own emotions, thoughts, and actions, ranks as one of the most important. Many kindergarten teachers highly value children’s ability to self-regulate, even more so than knowing letters or number concepts. Self-regulation is also a key component of developmentally appropriate practice: Besides teaching content knowledge and skills, early childhood educators are responsible for supporting children’s development of self-regulation. Children who can regulate their behavior are better able to participate in their learning communities, make friends, grasp concepts, and succeed in both school and life. Indeed, research shows that a child’s ability to self-regulate in the early years is a stronger predictor of later success in reading and math than even IQ scores.

Self-regulation development begins in infancy, spans the early childhood years, and continues all the way through adolescence and young adulthood. Within a learning environment that has consistent and appropriate rules and routines, adults play an important role in nurturing children’s self-regulation. It’s built over time with practice, support, and carefully curated opportunities. These include scaffolding children to take on meaningful roles, make choices, solve problems, and practice waiting and thinking before taking action.

We (the authors) have worked with early childhood educators for the past 30 years to help them build regulated, inclusive settings full of engaged learners. In this article, we describe self-regulation and its benefits, and we offer strategies that early childhood educators can use to support children’s development in this area to set the stage for a smooth preschool-to-kindergarten transition.

What Is Self-Regulation?

Self-regulation is what enables children (and adults) to stay calm, focused, and intentional in their actions—even when it’s hard. It’s not just about following rules; rather, it’s a key internal set of skills that allows people to manage their emotions, actions, and thinking. It includes inhibiting impulsive behaviors (shouting out answers) and acting intentionally (waiting for a turn). It is easy to mistake children being teacher-regulated, where they follow the rules as long as the teacher is present, for being self-regulated. However, when children are self-regulated, they follow the rules without adult direction. Focusing on the self in self-regulation is what sets children up for success.

Executive function skills make self-regulation possible. These include inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility (see “Terms and Definitions” below). Because early childhood is a time of rapid brain growth in the areas responsible for executive function skills, it offers a critical window for building the foundations of self-regulation.

Self-regulation supports social, emotional, and cognitive growth. It helps children navigate both social situations (like losing gracefully) and academic tasks (like staying focused on the word cat even when there’s a funny picture of a dancing dog nearby). Children with strong self-regulation can plan ahead, anticipate consequences, and monitor their behavior as they pause to consider their choices. Developing regulation-related skills is especially important in preschool and kindergarten so that children have the foundation they need to learn in elementary school.

To support children to develop self-regulation, educators must help children learn to manage themselves. This requires support and guidance rather than strict behavioral rules and consequences (such as timeouts or “three strikes and you’re out” policies). Learning environments should have both consistent and appropriate rules and routines and opportunities for children to exercise agency. If children never have opportunities to make choices, manage themselves, or take initiative, they will struggle when asked to work independently or in small groups without adult direction—tasks that are common in kindergarten settings.

Giving Children Agency to Self-Regulate

Supporting children to begin regulating themselves is challenging, not least because this area of development may not be widely understood (see “What Educators Need to Know About Self-Regulation” below). In the following sections, we outline how preschool educators can scaffold children to become more self-regulated before entering kindergarten and how kindergarten teachers can continue working on strengthening children’s emergent self-regulation abilities.

Plan Activities to Enhance Self-Regulation

Young children benefit from practicing deliberate and purposeful behaviors in playful ways. Indeed, using play to promote self-regulation is part of developmentally appropriate practice. These skills that are learned during play later transfer into being able to pay attention and remember the steps in solving problems in math and decoding words when reading.

Other contexts that give children opportunities to practice self-regulation can range from following simple rules in movement games to following multistep directions necessary to complete a science experiment. These kinds of activities help children practice following rules, accepting feedback, and changing a course of action when they need to. For example, games like Simon Says or Red Light, Green Light require children to inhibit their immediate impulse to move and to follow the rules instead. Activities with multistep directions offer children practice in remembering and following multiple steps instead of performing only the final direction they receive. Children also begin to learn to regulate each other in following the rules. For example, when playing a card game, children will remind a child who tries to go out of turn that they have to wait.

Use Visual Reminders to Scaffold Self-Regulation

Just as math manipulatives help children learn number concepts, visible and tangible reminders like a small poster or an index card bolster children’s agency in developing self-regulation. Visual reminders can be used to help children remember the rules of a game, whose turn it is, or the steps in a multistep activity without adult prompting. For example, a pictorial representation of the steps in a kindergarten math activity might be 1) Sort by triangles and squares; 2) Count the triangles and squares; 3) Write the number of triangles and the number of squares. Another example is passing around a pretend microphone or talking stick as a way to remind preschoolers to wait for their turn to talk.

Educators can create and introduce children to visual reminders for activities that present the greatest challenges in terms of self-regulation (like transitions). We also suggest embedding visual reminders throughout the day and regularly referring to them. This paves the way for children to plan and monitor what they’re doing at each transition point on their own. For example, a teacher can create and point back to a visual showing the following steps for getting ready for outdoor recess: 1) Put on a coat, hat, and boots; 2) Line up at the door; 3) Follow the line leader.

Visual mediators are more effective if they are brought out for a specific activity rather than posted on the walls where they become a part of the classroom’s decoration. Sometimes, only one or two children might need this type of support, so the visual reminder can be small, individualized, and used only when needed.

Make Time for Make-Believe Play and Dramatization

Make-believe play (in pre-K) and dramatization (in kindergarten) provide rich opportunities for children to practice self-regulation. This is because in mature make-believe play, children’s roles have rules of behavior: The “doctor” acts in a way that is different from the “patient”; a “nurse” takes a baby’s temperature, while a “parent” pushes the baby’s stroller. By acting out the roles they’ve taken on, children inhibit behaviors that are not part of their specific roles; otherwise, the play scenario may end. When children in kindergarten dramatize stories, they practice remembering a series of story events, staying in character by talking and acting as the character does, and exercising agency in inhibiting actions that do not fit the storyline.

Educators can scaffold make-believe play and dramatization by helping children plan what a scenario will look like, encouraging children to remember and maintain their roles. For example, play props ranging from dress-up clothes to stick puppets can act as reminders of who children are pretending to be, helping them resist distractions. Using books, videos, and field trips that familiarize children with what people say and do in different roles and settings, like the grocery store or fire station, supports the development of mature make-believe play—the kind that builds self-regulation. Shared background knowledge not only builds equity, enabling all children to enter into make-believe play, it also enables children to come to an agreement on how to play a scenario, what happens next, whose turn it is to talk, and how to use a pretend prop, which are all elements of mature make-believe play. (Read more about building make-believe play opportunities in preschool and kindergarten in “Assessing and Scaffolding: Make-Believe Play” and “Intentionally Building Self-Regulation and Literacy Skills: The Power of Dramatization in Kindergarten.”)

Prevent and Respond to Unregulated Behaviors

Even in settings with clear, consistent rules and routines, where educators have intentionally planned experiences to foster self-regulation, the unexpected will occur. It takes time for children to develop self-regulation. Even when they know what they should do, children may act impulsively—grabbing a toy, doing something out of turn, or blurting out the answer.

When this happens, educators can remind themselves that it is due to unregulated behavior, not a power struggle or malicious intent. They can remind the child what to do (rather than what not to do), focusing on what the desired regulated behavior is, and express confidence that the child will be able to self-regulate soon. They can also explore the root of the behavior: Was the child unable to remember what to do? Or did the child know what they were supposed to do but were unable to inhibit the impulse to do something else? Educators also can work toward helping children anticipate common conflicts and plan how they will pause, think, and choose a better action before things escalate.

For example, if Mr. Rodriguez knows that Juan, Meiling, and Sarah are going to play together, he can say to the children, “You know there is that special truck. How will you decide a fair way to take turns playing with it because there is only one of them?” He and the children can brainstorm to come up with ideas about how to take turns: Meiling goes first, then Juan, then Sarah, using a timer for each child’s turn; or they can create a scenario in which everyone plays with the truck (one person drives the truck and the others load and unload it).

In this situation, brainstorming with the children before they begin play not only positions them as active agents in problem solving to avert disagreements, but it also builds self-regulation. (See the Spring 2025 issue of Young Children on guidance and behavior for more ideas.)

As children become more self-regulated, they will begin to support each other’s self-regulation. At the beginning, this may show up as children reporting when their peers do not follow the rules. While a teacher might be inclined to immediately put an end to this behavior, it is a natural developmental step in children’s emerging self-regulation. Educators can respond with a brief confirmation: “Yes, that’s the rule.” Over time, children internalize the rule and follow it themselves.

Getting Started in Your Setting

Developing self-regulation is all about developing children’s agency and capacity to regulate themselves. To put these practices into action in their own settings, educators can begin by looking at their learning environments and activities through a self-regulation lens:

• Observe children as they demonstrate self-regulated behaviors. Are these behaviors a result of children’s own agency or of compliance?

• Does their regulation-related behavior change over the course of the day or during certain activities?

• What teaching strategies and materials do I already use to foster children’s self-regulation? How can I use these to increase child agency?

• What are some new strategies and materials I would like to try?

About the Authors

Barbara Wilder-Smith, EdM, has spent over 30 years in early childhood education as a teacher, coach, administrator, and researcher and is the executive director and co-developer of Tools of the Mind.

Elena Bodrova, PhD, is co-founder and knowledge advisor, Tools of the Mind.

Deborah J. Leong, PhD, is president and co-founder of Tools of the Mind and professor emerita of psychology at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Photograph: © Getty Images. Copyright © 2026 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See permissions and reprints online at NAEYC.org/resources/permissions.