8 Ways to Support Your Child’s Mental Health and Well-Being
As parents and caregivers, there are ways we can support our children to give them the best chance to stay mentally healthy.
Parents play a huge role in teaching activities that promote good mental health. The ability to label and manage emotions, identify needs, and ask for support are worth building for everyone — especially since these skills may help protect against future mental health concerns. You can help a child to have good mental health
1. Listen to Your Children’s Concerns
It is essential to listen to your children’s concerns. Let them feel heard and understood. Have a one-to-one conversation with them and listen to any concerns that might have. Once your child feels safe with you, they learn to trust you in every situation which is essential for their mental health.
2. Encourage physical activity
Physical health and good mental health are strongly correlated. Encourage your child to get exercise regularly or engage in other physical activities such as swimming, cycling, or whichever activity they love doing. Such activities uplift their energy, mood, and mental health.
3. Teach Your Child The Art of Positive Self-Talk
Teach your child how to engage in positive self-talk with themselves. This changes how they view the situation and help manage their feelings and response behavior. For example, “Come down, It’s now worth getting into an argument over this.”, “I am going to relax and it will pass.” and “I can do this.”
4. Encourage Your Child to Build Meaningful Friendships
Encourage your child to make new friends at school and around the neighborhood. You could also enroll them in a summer camp or classes of activities that they enjoy such as skating and swimming. Meet their friends and get to know the kind of influence they will have on your child.
5. Discipline Without Labeling
Practice gentle parenting. When disciplining your child, avoid using mean words like stupid, dumb, or calling them bad. This leads to the child feeling like they can’t do anything right or that they are not good enough for you. Instead, correct your child’s wrong behavior by explaining why their action was inappropriate and encouraging them to give it another try when they feel ready. This gives them the push to want to correct their mistake and do better.
6. Be Generous With Praise
Make it a point to always praise good behavior. Praise your children more than you reprimand them. Constant criticism will only lower your child’s self-esteem and make them feel like they can’t get anything right which is detrimental to their mental health. Praising your child whenever they have done a good deed boosts mental health.
7. Journaling
Journaling is an excellent coping strategy when dealing with big emotions. It may also help improve your child’s social skills by encouraging self-reflection from a young age. It could be as simple as writing three things that they are grateful for at the end of each day.
8. Get Professional Help If Needed
It is very important to spend enough time with your child so that you can easily recognize when they need professional help. Most parents tend to shy off when they notice that their child might need more help than what they have to offer. Addressing mental health concerns earlier on in life is the best thing you can do for your child. Children who grew up with good mental health tend to become responsible adults who know how to manage their emotions well.
You can also read 7 Effective Classroom Management Strategies at Coast Academy
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3 Reasons Spending Quality Time With Your Children Is Important
Once again, the half-term break is here with us.
For students, it is usually a time to relax, meet up with their friends, catch up on their favourite shows, go for their favourite recreational activities and lastly, binge eating junk food. On the other hand, most parents find half-term to be unnecessary in terms of time and money because of the fear of truancy.
But the real question is how do you spend quality time with your children?
Half term is meant to be a time for bonding, reflection and relaxation for families.
Coast Academy Student
However, most parents dread half-term breaks as it means them having to dig deeper into their pockets to finance the activities for the short break. For other parents, their main concern is the amount of unsupervised time that their children get during the half-term breaks, considering most parents are either full-time employees or have their own businesses to run, which translates to not enough time to keep an eye on the activities of their children.
Below is why you should spend more time with your child not just during half term, but all year round.
1. Cognitive development
The term cognition means the ability to use your conscious and subconscious parts of the brain to think, reason, remember and make decisions. Spending positive time with your children improves their Problem solving and decision-making skills.
2. Mental development
In this time and era, mental illness has become a global pandemic. Absent parenting is among the leading causes of mental health illness in school-going children. According to the Institute of Health Equity “lack of secure attachment, neglect, lack of quality stimulation, and conflict, negatively impact future social behaviour, educational outcomes, employment status and mental and physical health”.
Children’s exposure to neglect, direct physical and psychological abuse, and growing up in families with domestic violence was particularly damaging. This can all be restored through positive parenting, being there for your children, praising them, encouraging them and most importantly loving them. This in turn boosts their self-confidence and desire to succeed and make you proud.
3. Socio-cultural and spiritual development
The home being the first school, children learn the art of interaction through observing their parents. They tend to copy a lot from their parents and that is why a healthy and peaceful environment is needed at home, to build them up with good values and morals. Teach them to pray, to be thankful and liberal in such a way that they accept everyone regardless of their race, colour, religion, heritage or social status.
Considering that these are young developing minds, parents’ involvement in their children’s life is key to their growth . They should fully embrace the half term as it creates an opportunity for families to spend time together. Take it as an opportunity to understand your child’s wants and needs, listen to them, guide, support their goals and aspirations and also engage in activities that involve every member of the family such as board games.
Celebration of little wins and words of affirmation go a long way! As the old African proverb states, it takes a village to raise a child. Therefore if the parents and teachers work together, the society will become a better place.
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