{"id":2059,"date":"2022-05-08T19:55:07","date_gmt":"2022-05-09T00:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/178.128.4.67\/menta\/?p=2059"},"modified":"2022-05-08T19:56:01","modified_gmt":"2022-05-09T00:56:01","slug":"how-parents-can-help-children-who-may-be-struggling-with-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/how-parents-can-help-children-who-may-be-struggling-with-mental-health\/","title":{"rendered":"How parents can help children who may be struggling with mental health"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With one in five children and adolescents coping with a diagnosable mental health or learning disorder, the Child Mind Institute launched Monday its &#8220;Dare to Share&#8221; campaign, to encourage kids to talk about the issue of mental health. The campaign features celebrities, artists, athletes and role models who all share their personal stories, to de-stigmatize talking about mental health struggles and seeking support.<\/p>\n<p>In one video, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Pink speaks of her panic attacks: &#8220;I will tell you from being a very, very afraid 7-, 8-, 13-, 23-, 31-, and now 42-year-old woman, it does get better, and there are beautiful moments waiting for you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"P!nk Dares to Share\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/i3-HlDL9kdw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The campaign also features Olympic skier Gus Kenworthy, who said, &#8220;I myself struggle with depression. It&#8217;s something that I have to deal with every day. I&#8217;ve taken a lot of steps to try and better my situation. I&#8217;m on medication for it. And I just want you to know that there is help and there are resources out there for you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Emmy-nominated actress Maisie Williams (&#8220;Game of Thrones&#8221;) said, &#8220;I think ultimately just telling someone about it made me feel better. And I didn&#8217;t even need any big pearls of wisdom, being able to express myself helped get the overwhelming feelings out and they stopped being quite so overwhelming.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Visiting &#8220;CBS Mornings,&#8221; Jamie Howard, a senior clinical psychologist from the Child Mind Institute, said that it&#8217;s important for celebrities and individuals of influence to share their stories, to make it easier for young people to seek help.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Stigma is a huge barrier to care,&#8221; she said. &#8220;So, when we have celebrities who we look up to and we admire and we know that they&#8217;re so successful and talented, that makes it seem like, &#8216;Oh, it would be okay if I shared, too. I can get the help that I need.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>Who is at risk?<\/h2>\n<p>Co-host Gayle King asked, &#8220;When you say one in five children [has a mental health or learning disorder], do you have a specific age range that you think parents really need to pay attention at this particular age, this particular phase, this particular sex?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We like to look at through age 24 or so; that&#8217;s when the brain really kind of solidifies and our frontal lobes stop developing, and we&#8217;re adults at age 24,&#8221; Howard said. &#8220;And we know that the onset of mental health problems, 50% of disorders starts before the age of 14, and 75% before the age of 24. That&#8217;s really what we want to look at, childhood through early adulthood.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To examine why a child might experience mental stress or anguish, Howard pointed to a stress diathesis model, &#8220;meaning we have a biological pre-disposition, we have the environment we grew up in, and If we&#8217;re born prone to a mental health disorder, it&#8217;s going to come out earlier rather than later in life.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>Monitoring children<\/h2>\n<p>Co-host Tony Dokoupil said, &#8220;Everybody wants to raise resilient kids. That&#8217;s your goal as a parent \u2013 you don&#8217;t want to coddle your kids, but it&#8217;s hard to know where the line is between telling a kid to shake it off and get back in there, and it being a chronic problem, a real problem.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Howard said, &#8220;You want to monitor. It&#8217;s OK for kids to have setbacks, and we want kids to have moments of failure \u2013 that builds character, it builds resilience. So, we don&#8217;t want to spare children from any disappointments necessarily. But we want to monitor to make sure they&#8217;re functioning. If it goes on for, say, two weeks of a child being consistently sad and down and not interested in things they used to enjoy, then we might think, &#8216;This is starting to seem like a depressive episode and not just a momentary setback.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>Talking to your kids<\/h2>\n<p>Burleson said, &#8220;Something I had to learn as a parent was, each kid receives information differently. So, I have to parent them differently. I can&#8217;t have the same mental health conversation with my 18-year-old as I do with my 16-year-old, as I do with my daughter who&#8217;s 12. What advice do you give to parents that might be dealing with different personalities and struggling with an approach to talking to multiple kids?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Some rules of thumb are that you want to ask open-ended questions,&#8221; Howard replied. &#8220;And you want to be curious. You don&#8217;t necessarily want to go in expecting you already know the answer. Kids will always surprise you. So, sort of state your observations, and with empathy and earnestness ask, like, &#8216;So, tell me what&#8217;s going on, I&#8217;ve noticed you haven&#8217;t been spending time with your friends lately.&#8217; Or, &#8216;I noticed your grades are slipping.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And don&#8217;t jump to reprimanding them, but say, &#8216;What&#8217;s going on?'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What about kids who are struggling and don&#8217;t know how to ask for help \u2013 or parents who are struggling and don&#8217;t know how to ask for help for their children?&#8221; asked King.<\/p>\n<p>Howard replied, &#8220;That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s so important to have these ongoing conversations, so that the onus isn&#8217;t necessarily on kids to say, &#8216;Hey, I think I might be struggling with a mental health problem.&#8217; They don&#8217;t necessarily have that language, especially when you&#8217;re young. But if you have repeated conversations with children starting when they&#8217;re younger, then there&#8217;s an opportunity.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>Self-harm<\/h2>\n<p>Dokoupil said, &#8220;Suicide is obviously a worst-case scenario, but it is the leading cause of death for kids 15 to 19. We&#8217;ve heard from other guests that you should say the word; it&#8217;s okay to say to a younger person \u2013 you&#8217;re not planting a seed. Is that the right advice?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s true,&#8221; said Howard. &#8220;If someone is not suicidal, and you say to them, &#8216;Hey, have you been thinking about killing yourself?&#8217; They will not think, &#8216;Oh, no, I wasn&#8217;t, but now I am.&#8217; That&#8217;s not how that works.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s only if you have a mental health condition that you would say, &#8216;Actually, yes, and thank you for asking.'&#8221; Parents, she said, should be frank. &#8220;There&#8217;s nothing to be afraid of.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>King asked, &#8220;Do you think children would answer that question honestly?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think a lot of children would, because it feels really bad to have depression or anxiety. Like, we want to feel better when we have these conditions. It&#8217;s often we just don&#8217;t know how.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Source:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/mental-health-awareness-month-kids-and-mental-health-dare-to-share\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cbsnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With one in five children and adolescents coping with a diagnosable mental health or learning disorder, the Child Mind Institute launched Monday its &#8220;Dare to Share&#8221; campaign, to encourage kids to talk about the issue of mental health. The campaign features celebrities, artists, athletes and role models who all share their personal stories, to de-stigmatize [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[64],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2059"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2061,"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2059\/revisions\/2061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/menta.co\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}