WHAT’S WRONG WITH CHILDREN’S MENTAL HEALTH TODAY – AND HOW TO FIX IT

But why are our children struggling to adapt?

Over the last 50 years, parents have been exposed to an increasing degree of media coverage and societal influences that fundamentally changed the way they treat their children.

Fear of crime, injury, illness and misfortune increased under these influences and parents began to try to find ways to negate this perceived risk, usually by reducing their children’s exposure to things like outdoor play time, sports and independent activities. They replaced these, largely, with screens and parent-supervised activities.

We can all think of examples of this in action – where children would once play a ball or team game with others in their spare time, they will probably now spend the time staring at screens. Where a child who finds an exam stressful would once be considered normal, the same child might now be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder by a parent desperate to make that young person’s life as easy as possible. You may have heard the term “helicopter parenting” and this is exactly that.

The big problem with this fundamental change in parenting styles is that it fails to teach children key life skills – chiefly resilience, coping skills and mechanisms to deal with challenging situations later in life.

What are the implications of this change in parenting styles?

In order to understand the ramifications of this change in parenting styles, it’s important to understand the way we build and develop our mental health.

Like our physical health, mental health (or, more precisely, mental wellness) isn’t something that we’re born with. As children, we learn how to manage our thoughts, behaviours and emotions through learning from our parents or guardians plus other societal and social influences – these aren’t things that are magically implanted in our brain at birth. They are learned behaviours and form the basis for our mental health, good and bad.

Prior to recent generations, when the prevalence of issues such as depression and anxiety were much lower across all age groups, these learned behaviours were helpful – essential, some argue – in forming the basis for good mental health.

An activity such as a physical team sport taught people skills, coping skills and tolerance of adversity. Taking part in a snowball fight taught risk management and innovation. Riding a bike down a steep hill taught that scary things can also be fun and exciting. Scraping a knee or catching chicken pox taught a child more coping skills, and so on.

By removing, reducing or negating these perceived risk factors through modern parenting styles, children are failing to be inoculated against future negative influences on their mental health. This is vital for adult mental health, as detailed by a review of studies on stress that concluded: “Stress inoculation is a form of immunity against later stressors, much in the same way that vaccines induce immunity against disease.”

Imagine if a child didn’t get the MMR vaccine – they risk falling ill with measles or mumps later in life. This is exactly what’s happening with young people when they start to experience life’s ups and downs without the mental health skills to cope. They have little resilience to stressful, depressing or anxiety-inducing situations that would have been a relatively minor problem for someone a few decades ago.

This lack of coping skills – and entering adult hood without the necessary mental health to experience life in a positive, happy way – is the main driver behind issues such as depression, anxiety, phobias and disorders in young people.

The good news: mental health isn’t a static, fixed thing happeningtous…

Sadly, children’s mental health hasn’t been a priority in compulsory education and many parents won’t realise the repercussions of these subtle changes in parenting styles, so it’s not surprising there is a lack of knowledge and awareness when it comes to ensuring a child grows up mentally healthy.

But, just as many young people have learnt how to be mentally unhealthy (although, of course, not deliberately), it’s also possible tolearn how to have great mental health – and you don’t have to get in a time machine to revisit your childhood to do this.

Courses like The Thrive Programme’s specialist children’s mental health course are filling that knowledge gap in both parents and young people with extremely high rates of success. Through a series of easy-to-understand concepts, lessons and exercises, the course gives the person control over their mental health and teaches the skills needed to be happy, positive, confident and resilient, even in the face of adversity. Issues such as depression and anxiety (the two most common children’s mental health challenges) are replaced with confidence, resilience and self-belief.

Using a book or one-to-one with a Thrive Consultant, the course can be completed by parent and child together in just a few weeks, and the results are life-changing for both.

Let’s re-write the future by taking action today.

Please do contact me if you’d like to know more about the programme or if you’d like to do our free online assessment, through which you’ll gain some real insight into where your beliefs and thinking styles currently are (11 page report). I look forward to hearing from you.