Why Your Calm Matters: Understanding Co-Regulation With Your Baby
Most parents will recognise the experience of trying to settle a baby and gradually running out of ideas.
You’ve checked whether they’re hungry, tired, too hot or too cold. You’ve changed them, fed them, walked around with them, rocked them and tried different ways of holding them. They’re still unsettled, and after a while it’s easy to start wondering whether there’s something you’ve missed.
We tend to approach settling babies by thinking about what we need to do. There are certainly practical things that help, but there is another part of the picture that receives less attention: the role of the parent’s own emotional and physiological state.
This is where an understanding of co-regulation can be useful.
What is co-regulation?
Babies aren’t born with a fully developed capacity to regulate their emotions and physiological states independently. The systems involved in emotional regulation develop gradually throughout childhood, and their earliest experiences of regulation happen within relationships.
A baby therefore relies heavily on their caregivers to help them move through different states of arousal and distress.
We call this co-regulation.
This happens through ordinary interactions. Being held, rocked, spoken to, fed and comforted all provide sensory and relational information to a baby. Over time, repeated experiences of being responded to help to build the foundations from which greater self-regulation can eventually develop.
It is one of the reasons that responsive caregiving matters so much in infancy.
Babies respond to more than what we do
A baby doesn’t understand the meaning of our words, but they are sensitive to other forms of communication from a very early age.
They experience the tone and rhythm of our voice, our facial expressions, our touch and the way we move and hold them. They are also sensitive to changes in the emotional quality of an interaction.
This means that when we’re trying very hard to settle a baby while feeling increasingly tense ourselves, there can be quite a lot happening within the interaction.
The more a baby cries, the more anxious or frustrated we may become. We may begin moving more quickly, changing position repeatedly or trying one thing after another. Our breathing may become shallower and our muscles more tense.
None of this means that we’re doing anything wrong. It is a very normal response to hearing our baby cry.
But it does help to explain why settling isn’t simply a matter of finding the correct technique.
Why babies sometimes settle differently with somebody else
Parents sometimes tell me that their baby has been unsettled for a long time, only for somebody else to take them and for them to settle relatively quickly.
Understandably, this can feel frustrating.
There are many possible reasons for it, but sometimes the other person simply isn’t carrying the same level of tension or urgency. They haven’t spent the previous hour trying to work out what the baby needs, and they may be able to hold them without feeling the same pressure to make the crying stop.
Their breathing may be slower, their movements less hurried and their body less tense.
The baby is experiencing a slightly different interaction.
This isn’t evidence that somebody else is better at settling your baby. It is a useful illustration of how regulation is influenced by what is happening between two people, rather than simply by the particular settling method being used.
The developing nervous system
During infancy, the brain and nervous system are developing rapidly. Babies gradually learn to manage different levels of arousal through repeated experiences with the people who care for them.
Initially, much of this regulation is external. An adult notices the baby’s signals and responds by changing something: picking them up, feeding them, reducing stimulation, speaking softly, providing movement or simply staying close.
As development progresses, the child gradually becomes more able to participate in this process themselves.
This is why self-regulation is better understood as something that develops from repeated experiences of co-regulation rather than something babies and young children should already be able to do independently.
It also helps us understand why our own regulation can influence these interactions.
This does not mean parents need to remain calm
I think this part is particularly important because discussions about parental regulation can easily become another source of pressure.
The aim isn’t to remain calm all the time.
That would be neither realistic nor necessary.
Parents become tired, overstimulated, worried, frustrated and impatient. Babies cry. Sometimes nothing seems to settle them. There will inevitably be occasions when both parent and baby are dysregulated at the same time.
Healthy development doesn’t depend upon preventing those moments.
What matters is the broader pattern of the relationship: a caregiver who responds, reconnects and helps the child return to a more regulated state often enough.
There is room within a healthy relationship for difficult moments, missed cues and repair.
What this means when your baby is unsettled
Understanding co-regulation doesn’t mean abandoning all the practical things that help babies settle. If a baby is crying, we still need to consider what they might be communicating and whether there is a physical or practical need to address.
But once those things have been considered, it can also be useful to notice what is happening in your own body.
You may realise that you’re holding your breath or clenching your jaw. Your shoulders may be tense. You may have been pacing the room for twenty minutes while mentally searching for the next thing to try.
Rather than immediately changing what you’re doing, you might stay where you are for a moment and allow your breathing to slow slightly.
You might sit down, if that feels comfortable, or consciously release some of the tension in your shoulders.
The purpose isn’t to perform a relaxation exercise or to make yourself calm so that your baby stops crying.
It is simply to reduce some of the activation in your own nervous system so that you are better able to remain present with your baby.
Sometimes the baby will settle. Sometimes they won’t.
Both can be true while co-regulation is still taking place.
A baby can be supported while they are crying
It is easy to judge whether something is ‘working’ by whether the crying stops.
But crying is communication, and babies sometimes need to cry even when they are being appropriately cared for and comforted.
The important distinction is that the baby isn’t experiencing that distress alone.
They are being held, spoken to and responded to by somebody who is helping them manage an experience that they cannot yet manage independently.
Over time, these repeated experiences contribute to the developing capacity for emotional regulation.
The aim, therefore, isn’t always to remove the feeling as quickly as possible. It is to help the baby experience difficult states within the context of a safe and responsive relationship.
Parents need regulation too
There is another side to co-regulation that I think is sometimes overlooked.
Parents are often told that their calm helps their baby, without enough consideration of what helps the parent to feel calm in the first place.
Adults continue to regulate through relationships too. We are generally better able to cope when we feel supported, when somebody listens to us, when we have practical help and when we have opportunities to rest and recover.
For a new mother in particular, this matters.
Telling somebody who is exhausted, overwhelmed or carrying most of the responsibility for a baby that she simply needs to regulate herself misses an important part of the picture. Her environment and the support available to her matter too.
Supporting maternal wellbeing is therefore closely connected with supporting infant wellbeing.
A different way of thinking about settling
There are many useful approaches to settling babies, and different babies will respond to different things at different times. There is no single technique that will work for every baby or every situation.
Understanding co-regulation gives us another way of looking at those unsettled moments.
Instead of only asking, What else can I do to make my baby stop crying?, we can also consider what the baby is experiencing within the interaction.
Are their needs being responded to?
Do they have the closeness and support they need?
And what is happening in the adult who is supporting them?
Sometimes the most useful change isn’t another settling technique. It is slowing things down enough to notice what is happening between you and your baby.
Babies gradually learn about regulation through these repeated everyday experiences. Not through a perfectly calm parent, but through being cared for by somebody who responds, reconnects and helps them return to a more settled state over and over again.
That is the basis of co-regulation, and an important part of how the capacity for self-regulation begins to develop.
