Tips for maintaining child's mental health

If you are around 40 years old, your parents would not have searched for an article titled like this.

If you are around 40 years old and have children, you are certainly looking for an article titled like this.

The question is why? Is the number of mental health conditions are on a rise, or we are becoming more aware?

The data says, both of the options are correct.

The world was less aware about the conditions like Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, Learning Disabilities and others, about four decades before. Everybody was treated by the same rule of discipline, and there were fewer options.

In contrast to past, parents are more aware about the child’s status and mental health today. With the better lifestyle and fewer children, they want to focus on what best could be provided to the child, to maximize the results of parenting.

Decades before, because of the joint families tradition of India, where living of extended family was a norm rather than an exception, the child was exposed to different handling, scenarios, personalities, and thus, the child grooming had different flavours.

Now, keeping pace with the practicalities of urban lifestyle, reduction in family numbers has left the child with fewer handlings and lesser experiential learning.



Now, with this background, coming to the topic…

1. For better mental health, avoid social media : The take home is, we are humans, and we are social. We need a live human social contact rather than an artificial component surfacing between us. Contact of social media in the developing brain creates an artificial world which is disguised and creates a sense of low esteem.

2. Talk, talk, talk : Communication is the key to peaceful mind. Always allot a fixed time, which is free from any disturbance, to talk to your children. It could start from how your day went, what life threw at you, how you tackled it. Believe me, these small words of wisdom, interspersed with practicalities will bring you closer to your child, in which he will find you as a confidant, a friend. Whatever you teach didactically will have less impact, whatever he will see you practically doing it will have more impact.

3. Don’t compare : Every human being is different. Everyone has potential, to a different level, to a different regime. Make sure your role as a parent should be unconditional love, and if that doesn’t work, increase the dose.

4. It takes a village to raise a child : It is an ancient proverb which stands true even today. Make sure your child have enough people to talk to rather than inanimate toys to play with. Take him to friends, family, more social gathering than malls, halls, kid zones. We need to open our mind to companions rather than computer.

5. Set the record : A good life routine is where healthy mind stays. You a parent have to set an example to be copied by your children. If you are watching Netflix and commanding your child to sleep. It is a bad example. You have to be a hero to make your child superhero. With children work works better than words.

6. Don’t do helicopter parenting : It is good to know your child, but it is not good to interfere in your child’s life. According to Khalil Gibran, children are through you but not from you. The more you understand the concept, the better the child’s mental health would be.

Take a deep breath, remain calm, stay positive, and you would create perfect mental health in and around you.

(Dr. Puja Kapoor: Paediatric Neurologist & Co-founder of Continua Kids)