Nurturing Child's Mental Health - Part II
I accidentally pressed post early the other day. Sorry about that! Here is the full post! Sorry!
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Parents and family environment play the most important role in helping children to understand and manage emotions, develop resilience and foster positive relationships. The family is where it's all learned and where the healthy basis for life is built. Watching children grow and helping them to develop these skills is one of the great joys of parenthood but for many parents, it can be quite a challenging task!
It is especially tricky for parents like my self who didn't grow up in a healthy environment and have mental health issues themselves. It's kind of a double task: Resetting your self while you program your self. It's kind of like a broken C-3PO that keeps shutting down, resetting and having short circuits while trying to assemble a proper working droid himself. It can get tricky.
Another thing that adds to the importance of this theme is that as a somewhat challenged individual in that regard my kids are more likely to exhibit some mental health issues themselves: both because proness to mental health issues can be genetically conditioned and because I(, despite my best efforts, don't always model the best behaviour.
I decided to talk about nurturing because I feel it's the best term to describe what my goal is: I don't want to fix them, I don't want to teach them something new or turn them into someone they are not. I just want to nurture the health they were born with and try my best not to screw it up.
So this week I'll try and go through some stuff I have learned, I'm still learning and have yet to learn on my way. I know it's a tall order but I feel confident and hopefully inspired by my last week's success. Besides there is a lot for me personally to gain just by thinking through this theme, implementing it and learning more about it: both as a person and a parent.
Do you have any particular topic you are interested in? Tell me in the comments and I'll do my best to write about it. Thanks for joining in!
Tell The Truth
This one is important to me. Especially considering I had a recent experience of how the whitest of lies can lead to embarrassment and deuteration of relationships. But sometimes it can seem hard with kids. As white and black as the situation can seem it is more of a flexible issue when it comes to truth and kids. If you don’t know how to go about the truth-telling to your kids try taking these things into consideration first:
1.Give age-appropriate guidance - Different levels of comprehension, depending on individual personality development and age. Even children as young as 3 or 4 can understand how important it is, to tell the truth. But more often than not they tend to conflate imagination with reality. As they get older and get more responsibility they can start lying more often to cope with feeling overwhelmed. Schools and extracurricular activities along with chores and other things can become too much for them to handle so they’ll try and lie their way out of it. Easing the load and lowering expectations can help them get back on track. As they grow older you start to see how they come to implement their values of truth in their interactions with the world. They become more aware of the consequences their lies may bring so it’s crucial that we be the ones that offer safe haven and an environment where bad will not be punished but discussed and resolved. As they get older it is also important to introduce and clarify the idea of white lies. Help them distinct when honesty is desirable and when it’s considered right out rude. As much as we are tempted to praise ‘’brutal honesty’’ being polite is still a social norm we should aspire to. Dr. Gadhia-Smith advises: “The older the child, the greater the need for fully honest disclosure and guidance that will help the child integrate and set their own value system.”
2.Model the truth-telling - Kids learn more from what they see you do than what you tell them to. If they see you being honest, even if it’s to your disadvantage, and keeping promises to them. The truth will set you free will not ring true if kids see you prosper from lying. By modelling truth-telling we teach them the value of honest communication, confronting difficult life situations, and setting appropriate values. Kids are not as gullible as we might think: they are quite skilled in differentiating truth from lies and when their parent keep presenting them with statements they know are lies they start to doubt their own reality and trust themselves less and perceived authority figures more which can lead them into many dangerous situations later in life.
3.Find the fine line - Take some time to find the line between bluntness and blurring or omission. There is more harm than use from overprotecting our kids but we can be honest about the world problems like war and hunger without exposing our kids to too much brutal information they do not yet have the capacity to process. If we just expose them to news, which can often be brutal, graphics and distorted, without context the child will probably have a hard time making sense of what they saw. It is essential that we offer context and help make sense of unpleasant realities when the kids are small. If we analyze the information with the children we give them tools that are so valuable and rare these days: to critically think and be sceptical. Those skills can protect the kids from much harm. Plus they start to look at us as a trusted news source and if they happen to come across information they doubt or are confused about they can seek clarification from us. Which is a big plus.
4.Catch children doing the right thing – Notice when they do the right thing. Even when they will face consequences for it. If they learn that the positive can triumph over the enfeeble negative and the negative is normal, not a tragedy. Also, try and not create an environment where failure will be punished because the fear of punishment will make children prone to lying just so they fill your expectations. One of the most awkward situations last year for me personally was when my 4yo told the teacher she would set her on fire. In the preschool, they just told me that she was placed in timeout for being rude and interruptive in English classes but she herself told me why. We made sure to praise her honesty but talked a lot about why what she said was bad, we got to the cause of the problem which was hers and teachers mutual dislike. She had a talk with me and the teacher the next day about what she did, apologized and we ended up pulling her out of the class. It’s been better since.
5.Play – Role playing or playing with puppets, play true and false, create storyboards using simple stories like ‘’boy who cried wolf’’ or read stories like Pinocchio. Play is a powerful tool for learning skills and values and problem-solving all kinds of scenarios in a safe environment.
6.Ask for help – truth-telling is one of the most important skills and values a child can have so if you get stuck with a pretty little liar on your hands and don’t know what to do ask help. There is no shame in asking for help when we get stuck and it actually has more benefits for the child: it will help resolve the underlying problem, if there is one, show our children all kinds of problem-solving techniques and how we will go many lengths to salve it. I found this great story about how one family sought help when their kids wouldn’t stop lying and what they gained from it.
Model healthy behaviour
“Parents are very important in terms of arranging an environment and setting a model for healthy or unhealthy behaviuor,” says Dr. Leonard H. Epstein, an expert on childhood obesity at the University of Buffalo. “Parents bring foods into the house. They control how much time a child can watch TV. They control what kinds of social activities are paired with foods. And kids learn a huge amount about eating and physical activity from watching and imitating their parents.”
Dr. Julie Lumeng, another expert says that“Kids typically have to taste a new food 9 to 15 times to begin to like it,” so even though it’s best to start early healthy habits can be implemented anytime on your family journey.
We, as parents, bear the biggest responsibility for modelling healthy behaviour but also habits: Shaping healthy habbits can be challenging if we ourselves do not pose them. It requires an extra effort from us: in educating ourselves and then also implementing changes, be it healthier food or cutting down our own screen time or getting active. What is also important is that we detect unhealthy behaviour and reactions we might have like lack of patience, aggression or depression and seek professional help so we can be the best role models possible.
The other very important thing is how we manage our household. How we go about managing stuff, how we plan, what we do in our spear time, how we react to failures or changes of plans, how flexible we are…all of those things are chances to model desirable traits and behaviour patterns to our children and even if we fail each day is a new chance, for both us and them. One thing we can do is to set up our household for success. That is: if we want a tidy, easy-to-clean, household we should simplify the layout, minimise the stuff, make things kids should handle available and the ones they shouldn't out of reach. That way we minimize the chance of struggle battles and frustration. My personal experience is following: Despite having some disadvantages of sharing the house with my inlaws has allowed my kids to have wonderful healthy surroundings and great love and behaviour modelled. My husband's parents are really the sweetest people and shower the kids with love, understanding, acceptance and patience us two often lack. The stability and consistency in normal, predictable behaviour is something I cherish immensely giving the way my upbringing went.
Surround them with healthy adults
This one hits home for me because of the unhealthy environment I grew up in was surrounded by. The adults I was surrounded by ware bad people with bad habits. And good people with bad habits. Even though It did teach me a lot about the world I don't think it’s the way to go for my kids. So I’m really picky about who I surround them with. Starting with their Godmothers: They are all exceptional women, highly educated, smart, sharp and funny with cool interests in life. The all possess qualities I cherish and would like my kids to aspire to. For example, my eldest kids Godmother is brave: she took a chance of studying abroad and is now pursuing a carrier there. My middle kid's Godmother is an English and German professor and always talks English with them: she always speaks English with them and buys them the most exquisite books. And my youngest one? Despite having difficulties with studying she enroled in college and is making her way through while battling depression. Other quality people with kind hearts and sharp minds I surround my kids with are the ones like @dumar022 and @tomguad to name a couple.
Many studies show the importance of role models. Our brains are wired to connect and mirror the behaviour of others. Anyone who has raised a baby could watch it in full glory: most things a baby learns, it learns by copying us. It doesn’t stop once they past babyhood. Once they managed all the basics from us we can help them develop and nourish their own unique personas and interests by helping them find an rolemodel in your immediate surrondings. If your kid has an interest in sports find a good local club where he or she can train. Also try to find some more successful athlete that started in that very same club. My oldest wants to be an artist and she is tall and thin so I often show her the work of my friend@sanjalydia and we hang out with her so that she could see how far persistence and hard work will take her.
Hero worship shouldn’t disappear with childhood and adolescence. It can and should be a lifelong source of inspiration and motivation for us. As we can help our kids find to find good role models so can we: Find adults that raised good kids or are raising children in the manner we wish we could and copy them, listen to their experience. Surround yourself with good mothers, persistent mothers and find your strength in their persistence.