Emotion Regulation in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Berkovits et al. (2017) watched preschool and early-elementary kids with autism for ten months. They used the Emotion Regulation Checklist at the start and again at the end.

No therapy was given. The team just wanted to see if emotion dysregulation stayed the same and whether it forecasted bigger social or behavior problems later.

Scores hardly moved. Kids who were highly dysregulated at the beginning were still highly dysregulated ten months later.

Those stable high scores predicted new or worsening social and behavior difficulties. In short, emotion trouble did not fade on its own.

The picture is bleak without help. Uljarević et al. (2018) saw the same pattern in even younger toddlers: early dysregulation on the CBCL forecasted poorer adaptive skills later.

Tsai et al. (2018) added that when preschoolers use fewer calm-down strategies, parents also report lower quality of life. The stress spreads through the whole family.

Hope arrives in later studies. Anthony et al. (2020) and Thomson et al. (2015) show that short CBT packages can improve emotion regulation in 8- to 12-year-olds. Berkovits et al. (2025) now gives you normative no-treatment scores, so you can tell if your intervention really beats natural change.

Waiting does not work. If a young client shows high dysregulation on the Emotion Regulation Checklist, plan to treat it directly and soon. Use the 2025 norms as your baseline, borrow CBT elements shown to work with older kids, and track both child and parent outcomes so you catch family-wide gains.