Ways you can help improve your child’s mental health
Helping your child deal effectively with their emotions is an important part of ensuring their mental wellbeing.
Did you know that an estimated 10-20% of adolescents (kids aged between 10 and 19 years) globally experience mental health conditions?
Here’s how you can teach your children about the importance of taking care of their mental health:
Make sleep a priority
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 role model for them
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.
Assist them in recognising 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 like Fedhealth have Emotional Wellbeing Programmes, where consultants will provide a listening ear and refer you or your child for professional counselling, if needed.
Make time for creativity and play
Adults have to give a name to our play time: 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.
Communicate and converse
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.
