How To Help With Your Children’s Mental Health

For most parents in this day and age mental health is a genuine concern, more and more has been brought to light on mental wellbeing. With more and more people and children suffering from it, it can be a tough thing to deal with. However, there are things you can do as a parent to help with children’s mental health.

If you are worried about your kid’s mental health and you are looking for ways to help them and yourself with it. Then these few tips should help to give you some ideas of how you can help your children with their mental health.

Focus on your mental health

It can be easy to just focus on your child’s mental health, however most of the time they are moulded in your image. If you find that your mental health is suffering and you are not doing something about it then you need to, if you are feeling anxious or depressed then try and seek your own help first. Your children can pick up on your mental health problems and get their own, so a great place to start is making sure you are in a good place mentally.

You need to build up trust

Initially, your children may not want to approach you and discuss mental health, maybe they think they might be in trouble for it or they find it hard to talk about. You need to have that trust where your children can approach you and have that discussion. The best way to do this is by broaching the subject with them first and inviting them to discuss anything that is on their minds with you. You then must honour it by not telling them off or getting mad, should their mental health be driven by something they may have done or something like that, otherwise they will just close up again and not talk to you.

Monitor their mental health

This is not something that is easy to do but there are ways you can, firstly see if they will write down in a journal or on paper how they are feeling and what is bothering them. Make sure they are aware it is something you want to read, this way you can monitor how they are feeling and pick up on triggers for their mental health. It may also be a good idea to talk to the school, they may have a platform to monitor wellbeing in schools. So if they have this in place they may be able to inform what your child has been filling out about their well-being in the surveys they pass around. Sometimes children feel more comfortable speaking to a professional whether this is a child psychiatrist or a teacher so make sure they have the opportunity to if needed, do not be disheartened if they are not talking to you but be happy they are talking to someone and not bottling it up.

If you are worried about your child’s mental health and you are unsure how you can best help them, then these tips will hopefully give you some ideas of what you can do to monitor and help your children with their mental health.