I recall in 2006 when I was commencing my honours research, there was an important article reported in the Australian news that caught my attention: "In the Mood: How emotions affect creativity and concentration". I was studying the fear of losing control over strong emotions in adolescents, and I had to go to multiple public and private high schools to collect data. To do so, I had to speak with principals for their permission and to "sell" my research. So, putting both together, I armed myself with the newspaper article and study rationale, I went into each school. To my surprise, many principals met with me with concern written on their faces. Our conversations seemed to always surround issues related to their students cutting themselves, and getting caught in school for bloodied clothes and scars.
As I ventured further into the research, I became more convinced that by adolescence, if you didn't learn how to manage your own feelings, you'd be having a tough time learning how to handle the strong/possibly extreme feelings expected during pubertal-emotional changes. Now, in 2017, having been trained as a clinical psychologist, and awareness of the central developmental tasks all kids have to go through, I am convinced that learning to manage emotions from as early as the first few years of life, is crucial to the formation of emotional competence. Besides, my daughter reminds me everyday how appropriate emotional regulation, done in a firm but fair way, can make a big difference in emotional adjustment of toddlers. Taking the Circle of Security and Object Relations paradigms into consideration, it then makes sense to imbue within ourselves the characteristics of secure attachment figures - to be bigger, stronger, wiser, and kind.
Check out the article posted on Motherly, for techniques that teach toddlers to handle their emotions: https://www.mother.ly/child/remain-calm-how-to-help-your-child-handle-negative-emotions
Let's look at the multiple ways of understanding this complex phenomena.