4 keys for unlocking your child’s emotional wellbeing

Children face a lot of challenges as they grow up. It’s important to protect them and make sure they feel secure. One way to do this is by focusing on emotional wellbeing.

As Mental Health Awareness Month takes center stage in May, we want to focus on helping parents, caregivers and caring adults understand more about emotional wellbeing and how to support it in children.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Mentally healthy children have a positive quality of life and can function well at home, in school, and in their communities.”

What is emotional wellbeing?

Emotional wellbeing impacts almost every aspect of our overall health and wellness. It can lay the foundation for children to:

Learn how to overcome challenges.

Handle emotions.

Get along well with family, friends, and important adults.

Keys to supporting kids’ mental health

The good news is that like your physical health, you can take steps to improve a child’s mental health and overall emotional wellbeing.

Here are four ways to help foster your child’s emotional wellbeing:

Understand childhood stress:

Kids feel stress, too. Stress is both a negative and positive part of life, and to help our kids positively handle it, it is important for us to have a healthy perspective on childhood stress and change the way we think about stress.

We can also model how to handle stress to our children by demonstrating coping and self-soothing skills ourselves.

Raise resilient kids: Resilience is the ability to adapt and cope during tough times. It is the ability to work through challenges and grow from life experiences. Being resilient does not mean that we will never go through hard times or feel negative emotions; it is simply about having the ability to handle these challenges and adapt.

To support our kids’ resilience, we should remember to love them unconditionally, allow them to fail (safely) and promote their independence while providing guidance and support along the way.

Encourage positive connections: Connection is essential to emotional wellbeing. Having connections allows us to have support during hard times, to learn to have empathy for others, and to provide better awareness of ourselves. Encourage your kids to have healthy connections with friends, family, community groups, spiritual groups, schoolmates and those who share their hobbies.

And it’s important to encourage connections across several of these groups to help them have a place to fall back on if a connection goes awry.

Connect physical wellness to emotional wellbeing:

When our kids are in optimal health, they can better manage stress, sleep well, feel confident and have more energy. When our physical health and mental health are balanced, we have emotional wellbeing.

When promoting your child’s emotional wellbeing, you do not have to focus on all four at once. Just start small and try to make connections with your child today.

Dayton Children’s Hospital is dedicated to the relentless pursuit of optimal health for every child within our reach. To connect with Dayton Children’s, go online to www. childrensdayton.org.