MENTAL HEALTH
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This topic touches all of us – we all want the best for the next generation, particularly if they are your own children. As a mother of six myself, I constantly worry about my children’s wellbeing, and I am plagued with the never-ending juggle between career and home life. My raging mother guilt largely relates to the fear my child will suffer sadness, bullying, depression, or pain.
First up, we must acknowledge that some kids will suffer with poor mental health that requires more support than you can give them. In these cases, your acceptance of them and their mental health challenges can go a long way. Get medical/psychological help and get it early. Mental health is a combination of experiences (environment), genetics and personality. Many children start off with a sunny disposition, albeit riddled with tantrums, tiredness, and no volume
control. As they age, tantrums are swapped for indifference, parents are intolerable, and you miss the incessant questions. Yet they still want the same things, like we do – acceptance, enjoyment, and fulfilment. So, what can we do? How do we give them a balance of protection and freedom to develop independently?
For me, the key is trying to provide them with a robust foundation to thrive in. How? Teach them how to deal with failure. I fully appreciate inclusiveness and ensuring all children feel loved, heard, and valued but I also feel we have swung a little too much over to “mediocre is great”. We now give a ribbon to every kid that runs the race, to ensure children don’t feel isolated and not good enough, but by doing so we have taken away their ability to find resilience through loss. We wrap our kids in emotional cotton wool then wonder why they can’t cope when they encounter a bully or fail to get into the university they dream of.
So let them fail, as through failure comes success. The word ‘fail’ can be thought of in a negative way full of remorse and sadness, or we can reframe it as the ‘F’irst ‘A’ttempt ‘I’n ‘L’earning.
If they fail, let them really experience the disappointment, get sad, get angry, allow them a moment of poor control. Then once they start to recover and have regained composure, sit down and really celebrate their ability to survive it.
Resilience is not withstanding or weathering challenges, it is returning to baseline after things fall over and going again … on repeat.