Mental Health

Mental health refers to our cognitive, behavioral, and emotional wellbeing – it is all about how we think, feel, and behave.

Mental health problems affect about 1 in 10 children and young people. The emotional wellbeing of a child is just as important as their physical health. Good mental health allows children to develop resilience to cope with life as healthy adults.

Tips on promoting Mental health and Well-being:

  • Maintain Physical health, balanced diet and good regular exercise.
  • Model good mental health habits.
  • Make sure they get enough sleep.
  • Give them time and freedom to play.
  • Provide them a space of their own.
  • Talk about their troubles.
  • Help them to relax.
  • Being part of a family that gets along well most of the time.
  • Send them to a school that looks after the wellbeing of all its pupils.
  • Resist the urge to raise your voice.
  • Create a home that is low on stress, safe and supportive.
  • Foster volunteering and helpfulness
  • Encourage communication.
  • Give them time.
  • Create calm. Use sentences like “sit down”, “take a deep breath.”
  • Have two routines. Weekday and weekend.
  • Approach with care, not anger.
  • Bring fun and playfulness into their lives.

Social Health: Social Health involves one’s ability to form satisfying interpersonal relationships with others.

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Strategies to improve Mental Health:

Strategies at home:

  • Be a good listener.
  • Model the behavior you seek.
  • Nurture your child’s self esteem.
  • Respect differences.
  • Take advantage of support services.
Strategies at School:
  • Investigate your school’s effort to support social and emotional learning.
  • Get involved.
  • Celebrate diversity.

Spiritual Health: Spiritual health is a personal matter involving values and beliefs that provide a purpose in our lives. Having compassion, the capacity for love and forgiveness, joy and fulfillment help you enjoy your spiritual health.

Tips on improving Spiritual Health:

Teach your child the following and help him in practicing these.

  • Respect (As a parent be a model to your child by showing respect to others)
  • Empathy
  • The importance of staying together as a Family
  • Adjusting and compromising
  • Helping mentality
  • Respecting religion
  • Justice
  • Honesty
  • To never hurt anyone
  • Love for education
  • Meditation and prayer
  • Love for nature
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Teaching Empathy to children

Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. We can teach Empathy to children by doing the following.

  • The best way to teach empathy is to model empathy.
  • Kids are more likely to develop empathy when their emotional needs are being met at home.
    • Encourage them how to identify their feelings. It’s nearly impossible to understand how another person feels if you can’t even understand how you feel.
  • Teach children to be responsible.
  • It’s tempting to solve every problem for our little ones. We usually have a solution, after all. But if we solve every problem, we rob them of the opportunity to learn a critical life skill.