Your Child and Mental Health

While many adults believe that children live a life of ease, this is certainly not necessarily always true. Your child and mental health is a dynamic world unto it’s own.

Children are not without their own emotional, mental, and physical troubles. Just as with older humans, children are capable of feeling all types of feelings. These include feelings of sadness, hurt, mistrust, anxiety, and anger. In addition, the way that children deal with these feelings can have a huge effect on their emotional health. Children and mental health often reflects greatly on the parental mental health that a child has when he or she become a parent themselves. Kids that grow up in a positive environment are much more likely to be positive adults than those that experience negative emotional mental health during their childhood.

Infant and child mental health establishes a foundation of self-esteem for life.

Children as young as infants are aware of trust and mistrust in others and in self. After a child is only a few months old, their emotional health begins to develop. It is important during infancy that a baby learns he or she can trust the caregiver. The baby needs to know that his or her needs are taken care of when a diaper should be changed or a feeding needs to take place. Infants that go long periods of time without the attention of the caregiver are much more likely not to trust.

Once the infant passes through the stage of placing trust in others, a toddler encounters a stage of emotional mental health called autonomy vs. shame and doubt. During this period, the child needs to feel that he or she is capable of independence. While an infant needed others, toddlers are looking for space to obtain good mental health. When a toddler is not given the opportunity to find independence, he or she often grows up having a lacking self-esteem, feeling ashamed as well as a whole assortment of other mental health issues. Much independence during this stage of life is found through potty training with the toddler taking care of his or her own bathroom needs.

Your child and mental health goes hand in hand with the circumstance of the family environment while growing up.

Initiative verse guilt follows the toddler stage when a child reaches preschool and kindergarten. During this stage, the child emotionally needs to explore others and the world around him or her and begins to become interested in belonging to a group and role-playing within that group. During this stage of life, a person develops much of their background for social interaction. Children who are allowed to explore and interact with others are much more likely to carry over positive social skills into adulthood than those that are secluded from group activities. These others can end up on the opposite side of the spectrum in regards to their social and mental health becoming withdrawn from others.

It is quite apparent that child and adult mental health become synonymous throughout life.

Part of creating a solid foundation in children to carry over into adulthood is allowing children the opportunity to learn how to make choices. Children need to experience the effects that their choices have on their lives. Instead of continually giving a child direction, it is better to give a child options.

When allowed to take some actions into their own hands helps create an emotional mental health framework for the future, Setting boundaries and preparing children for disappointments help children prepare for good mental health and avoidance of mental health issues as an adult. In some cases, children can make choices for themselves. However, children also need to learn that not everything will always be controlled by them. They need to learn to accept the things that they cannot control. A child that learns to cope with disappointment through a caregiver that sets boundaries will grow into an adult with a foundation of more positive emotional mental health than those children that never experience hearing the word “no”. All of this is very critical for child and adolescent development.

While all research indicates that the environment in which a child grows greatly affects his or her emotional mental health, not all parents that fail to properly foster their child’s stages of health are neglectful or bad parents. In fact, many parents struggle with the proper methods they should carry out to help their child grow into a prosperous adult.

Interaction is a great way to help your child’s emotional mental health bloom. Children need to be cuddled and feel the touch of others. In addition, they need communication. Even as an infant, babies respond to parents and others through coos. Responding to these babbles is an important part of the infant and child mental health development process (both mentally and emotionally). As the child grows older, let him or her know what he or she has to say is important by listening and responding in conversation.

In addition to talking, your child and mental health is dependent upon nonverbal responses also. Be certain to make eye contact with the child. Share gestures and facial expressions during daily routines such as dinner, story time, and bath time.

Be certain that you have expectations for your child and that they are appropriate for the child’s age level. Placing too much pressure or high expectations on your child can be harmful to his or her emotional mental health. Do not place expectations on the child that he or she is not mature enough to handle.

When your child reaches a charged emotional situation, try to help the child understand the feelings and work through the problem. Let your child know that it is okay to express emotions if they are expressed in a proper manner.

Raising or working with a child can be a large responsibility when it is realized that the things the child experiences now affects how he or she will respond to the world as an adult. The positive or negative environment that a kid encounters through childhood affects the ways that he or she handles situations independently when grown.

Carefully considering the emotional health needs that help a child feel secure

Reclaiming Good Mental Health

What is good mental health? We are all more or less mentally healthy, and this usually varies through our lives especially as we deal with difficult life events, change and so on. Whether we call this psychological wellbeing, happiness, contentment, positive mindset, all these terms relate to good mental health.

With our physical health, it’s part of our everyday discourse to be aspirational. We want to feel physically fit, energetic, strong, balanced in our weight, eating a healthy diet, supple, resilient and not prone to minor ailments. Sure we complain about our problems, and talk about how we can’t do all the things we know we ought to do. We know it’s not easy to stay physically healthy without working at it, especially if we’ve experienced health problems. We know that even if we reach the peak of physical fitness, we can’t maintain this for the rest of our lives without paying attention to it.

Research tells us that good mental health is even more beneficial than good physical health. A positive mental outlook increases the rate and speed of recovery from serious, even life threatening, illness. Psychological resilience and wellbeing gives people the strength to turn problems into challenges into triumphs.

Yet whenever I ask a group of people to tell me what words come into mind in relation to ‘mental health’, their responses are about mental ill-health! It’s as if the term has been hi-jacked to become totally problem-focused.

In the meantime, we’re experiencing an epidemic of mental ill-health. About 1 in 4 people are experiencing some form of common mental health problem such as depression, anxiety and various stress related symptoms. GP surgeries are overwhelmed with such problems, mental health services are only able to provide support for the 1% of the population with much more severe mental health difficulties, and there’s a plethora of largely unregulated services, treatments and remedies out on the private market. A recent research study showed that the majority of long term sickness absence from work resulted from stress related conditions.

The trouble with focusing on the problems and the pain, is that that’s what we become experts in. We’re looking for cures and treatments to fix the problem, instead of focusing on what makes for good mental health. We know that physical health is multi-dimensional – no-one imagines that pumping iron to build your muscles is a recipe for overall physical health, although it will certainly make you stronger for certain activities.

So what are the essentials of good mental health?

Connection is certainly one of the best known. Having positive close relationships is good for our mental health, as is having a wider network of friends, colleagues and acquaintances which will vary over time. Giving to others is another really important aspect of connection, improving our sense of self worth and wellbeing.

Challenge is about learning and development, it’s how we grow. For children, everyday brings new challenges, yet as adults we often become increasingly fearful of change, unwilling to learn new skills or put ourselves in unfamiliar situations. So expanding our comfort zone, sometimes in small ways if we’re feeling particularly vulnerable, will help develop our self-confidence and sense of personal achievement.

Composure means a sense of balance, and ability to distance ourselves from our thoughts and emotions. It means our ability to respond rather than react. This could be described as our sense of spiritual connection, which may come through a particular belief or faith, or may be found through connection with nature. A mentally healthy person will feel an inner strength of spirit, and find ways to support that.

Character relates to the way in which we interpret our experiences and our responses to them. We all have our own personal story, or stories, which we may or may not tell others. We may cast ourselves as the hero, the victim or the villain, and however we do this will impact generally on our mental health. Someone who has experienced severe life trauma may have great difficulty piecing together their story at all, leaving them feeling literally fragmented. Good mental health means having a strong sense of personal values, awareness of our own strengths, skills and resources, and personal stories of learning from mistakes, survival, success and appreciation.

Creativity represents the fun, childlike aspects of our mental health. As children we are naturally creative and we play. As we grow into adulthood, our creativity and playfulness is often discouraged or devalued, and this can cause great frustration, literally diminishing the capacity of our brain to function as well as it could. Exploring creative activities has often been found to have a powerful therapeutic effect, and good mental health certainly depends in part on opportunities to bring fun, playfulness and creativity into our lives.

These 5 C’s of good mental health offer a framework within which we can think about our mental health in the same way as we might our physical health. It’s pretty damned hard to be a perfect specimen of physical health,but then who needs to be perfect? Just like our physical health, our mental health is a work in progress and always will be.

In years gone by, many people with physical illnesses were treated cruelly because of ignorance and shame. I recall when cancer was spoken in hushed whispers as the Big C. Nowadays mental ill-health is the ‘elephant in the room’ which we need to be looking at long and hard, exposing to practical common sense and intelligent discussion.

World Mental Health Day on October 10 has been a timely reminder that good mental health really is something we can aspire to for everyone. Let’s make it so!

Carolyn Barber, Bsc (Hons), CQSW, is the founder of Wayfinder Associates, a social care training and consultancy business specialising in team development, independent supervision and staff wellbeing. As a serial social entrepreneur, Carolyn has developed community based programmes to promote understanding of mental wellbeing using positive solu