Caring for kids’ mental health
Top advice for adults on building family communication
Growing up is hard at the best of times and the last few years have made it even more challenging for young people.
Mental health is just as important as physical health and one of a parent’s key roles is to support their child’s mental wellbeing.
Here psychotherapist Noel McDermott offers the following top 10 tips on helping kids open up and improve communication.
This can encourage a more open mindset in children as well as positive thinking when it comes to making choices.
1 - Listen to their opinions: By asking your children questions you will teach them that their thoughts and voices are valued and that their opinion matters.
This means they are more likely to come to you if something is bothering them.
2 - Identify emotions Children have a heap of emotions floating around their heads which are often hard to
process.
This can make them emotional without knowing why, such as hunger, anger, sadness, jealousy, and tiredness.
As a parent you can make this easier by helping them identify how they are feeling and why this might be.
This, in turn, will help them organise their thoughts and normalise them.
3 - Validate feelings Normalise your child’s emotions, all emotions are okay to have and the more we talk about them the more it validates this.
It’s okay to feel sad and down, explain to your child that we all have moments when we feel we want to cry and that grown-ups cry too!
4 - Empathy in Parenting Showing empathy involves understanding what your child is going through and quite simply, life is easier for children if they are shown the kindness and compassion they deserve.
So, make the time to check in with your child, open up the conversation and give them the chance to connect with you, this way if something is troubling them, they are more likely to talk to you.
5 - Family circle time
Form habits around setting aside time each week for the family to share feelings in a nonjudgemental space. It’s often called ‘circle time’ and doesn’t have to be a big stress.
For example, once a week after a family meal spend 5 minutes going around the table giving each person some uninterrupted time to check in with their feelings and share them with each other.