Is your child stressed? Help them cope with mental health

We owe it our children to give them practical tools and habits that will build their resilience and prepare them for whatever awaits them in the wider world – and strong mental health is crucial in order to do this. Here are a few easy ways you can help your kids cope with (and improve) their mental wellbeing.  

Inspire good sleeping habits

Good sleep habits start from when they’re babies. Teach them to self soothe and to stick to a consistent bedtime routine, and ensure that sleep is a priority in their lives – not an afterthought. If your tweens or teens have cell phones, make a rule that phones aren’t allowed in the bedroom after 8pm, for example. Everyone should leave their devices in the kitchen and they can then get them back the next morning.

Be a good role model

Just as they model their other behaviour on you, so too will they model any examples you make in terms of your mental health. Whether it’s putting away your phone at certain times of the day, diarising your weekly yoga class, or going off to do a 15-minute daily mindfulness session, make it obvious to them that you make mental wellness a priority – and they will follow suit.

Teach them about emotions This is especially true for younger children, but it will serve them well as they grow up too. So often a child struggles with the way they are feeling because they can’t put a label to it, and they don’t know that it’s actually a very common emotion for everyone to feel. Teach them what “disappointment” feels like, or “frustration”, or “embarrassment”, and tell them that it’s normal to feel like this at times – life isn’t about being happy 100% of the time. It’s also a strength to ask for help when you need it: if you need some professional guidance, some medical aid companies have Emotional Wellbeing Programmes, where consultants will provide a listening ear and refer you or your child for professional counselling, if needed.

The importance of play

Adults have to give a name to our playtime: we call them hobbies! With all this overscheduling we do for our kids, it’s vital for their mental health that we set aside free time – and not just when they’re toddlers. Tweens, teens, and young adults all need free time when nothing is expected of them and they can just relax, recharge, and have fun.

Connect with your child

This sounds so obvious, but unless you’re making a conscious effort to pause in your busy lives and connect with your children, enquiring about how they’re feeling – you could miss vital warning signs. A useful and practical solution to this is to hold “family meetings” once a week, where you all sit down and take a turn to talk about what happened to you this week, and how you felt about it. It could be around the dinner table on a Sunday – and you could even take notes, listing a goal for each of you that you’d like to achieve, or something problematic that you want to address.