Sarah Harte: How can parents best support their children's mental health?
Protecting children involves equipping them with the knowledge that life can be hard and unfair, and that low mood, anxiety, and stress are components of life.
Some parents will be guiltily relieved the challenge of keeping children entertained throughout the summer months and juggling work is over. Others will be struggling with back-to-school costs. Many of us are frightened about what the coming months will bring economically. It’s a challenge not to pass this anxiety on, and young people have already had much to contend with.
A Unicef report last year exposed the breadth and depth of European adolescent mental health issues, with 19% of boys aged 15-19 suffering with mental health disorders, followed by more than 16% of girls the same age.
Nine million adolescents aged 10-19 are living with mental health disorders, with anxiety and depression accounting for more than half the cases. The report is clear the pandemic compounded a decade-long pattern of already deteriorating adolescent mental health.
So, is there anything we can do as parents to support our children's mental health as they begin a new academic year?
Helping others is constructive for young people’s mental health. A Dutch study reported this year in , the EU Commission’s research and innovation magazine, found the part of the brain corresponding to personal rewards is activated by helping others. It seems helping others is vital for adolescent development while contributing to personal "vigour".
Modern discourse is centred on rights rather than responsibilities. It could be useful in achieving a healthier mental balance to encourage young people to focus less on their story (on the I, me, the self), and to direct thoughts outwards and towards others.
Teaching resilience to young adolescents has also been found to be key to a healthy mental balance. The European UPRIGHT project conducted in five countries over three years aimed to build a mental wellbeing culture in schools by delivering a training programme on mental resilience.
Teachers and parents received training, with secondary school students being taught coping skills including self-efficacy, the value of effort, and emotional and social resilience.
The project concluded that by teaching children "coping skills", serious mental health disorders that might otherwise develop as a response to stressful events could be prevented.
Unsurprisingly, the UPRIGHT project found the family plays the primary role in emotionally educating children, what we signal as parents to our children is crucial.
It is agony as a parent to watch a child struggle. Mental health in young people is notoriously difficult to assess. Nobody wants to be a mental health denier but there is arguably a distinction between bona fide depression and low mood. There is a line between crippling anxiety and the anxiety experienced in the cut and thrust of life.
Protecting children involves equipping them with the knowledge that life can be hard and unfair, and that low mood, anxiety, and stress are components of life. You have to do things you don’t want to do, rub along with people you don’t like, accept disappointments and deal with setbacks.
A conversation with the headmistress of a large boy’s secondary school shed light on some changes she has seen over a long teaching career. It probably comes as no surprise to hear parents are more involved in every facet of their offspring’s education.
She says parents have higher expectations for their children, and of teaching staff but are quick to make excuses for a child who hasn’t done their homework or even failed to turn up to school, citing stress and anxiety.
At second level, many school principals have reported a pattern of non-attendances. Covid was an obvious factor in keeping children out of school, but it is this headmistress’s opinion that long before the pandemic parents became more unwilling to compel a child in a way that would once have been recognised as commonsensical.
A new report by the UCD School of Education found during a five-year study of primary school children that they were overprepared in numeracy and literacy when starting junior infants but underprepared in coping skills. The report says there is a sign of a “disconnect” between parents and teachers over expectations around learning at preschool and primary level. It emphasised the need for social and emotional learning to be a more important goal.
The headmistress I spoke to would love somebody to do a PhD analysing how and why Irish parenting has changed so much over the past three decades. It used to be the case that parents barely darkened the door of a school (not good either) — now teachers are badgered out of hours by parents demanding answers.
She questions the impact of raised parental expectations of what a school should deliver to a child coupled with a tendency to allow children off the hook too easily. Does it affect how they perceive themselves and how they meet challenges?
The Unicef report on deteriorating adolescents’ mental health recommended school programmes build emotional coping skills for adolescents. Pieta House’s Resilience Academy currently runs training programmes for secondary school students aimed at equipping them with emotional resilience tools, but maybe it is time to consider an UPRIGHT type of initiative across Irish schools involving teachers, students, and parents. Such a measure might also conceivably save money in the long-term for our health and social welfare systems.
Mental health has been relatively destigmatised so that people thankfully feel more able to be open about challenges. Sharing these stories can make others feel less isolated and encourage them to share their difficulties. This can particularly benefit young people, who often internalise problems.
But sometimes listening to yet another high-profile person (often in jobs that require a healthy ego) detail their social anxiety, crippling shyness, it can feel like "struggles" have become a currency.
Editor Edward Enniful was reported in this paper as having written in his autobiography, , “we need young people coming into the world as empowered as they can be”.
Is there a risk that pathologising arguably routine struggles that are part of what it means to be a human being in this messy, beautiful, often painful life risks normalising subtle victimhood.
Maybe it is how we frame problems, how we tell our stories. Or how we encourage young people to balance tending to their interior life with how they act in everyday life meeting responsibilities and helping them to feel competent.
The good old days’ is a myth. Listening recently to people in their 70s take a trip down memory lane recalling people from their past, it was noticeable many stories ended in, "of course he/she was a hopeless alcoholic".
This made me wonder if some of the Olympian drinking casually alluded to stemmed from the trauma of not being heard, of not being helped in an Ireland that was in the dark ages when it came to mental health. And when sexual abuse, addiction, and violence were often the underbelly of life, both at home and in school.
No parent ever gets it completely right. So, often as a parent, you think, if I could go back again, I’d do that differently. Human nature doesn’t change, the Capulets and Montagues fretted over Romeo and Juliet. But new epochs bring fresh challenges and certain lessons can’t be contracted out to teachers.
Doing our best for our kids includes equipping them with the capacity to address adverse situations that life presents us with. Perhaps this starts with turning up to school and doing homework, encouraged by parents who do not make excuses to teachers for their offspring, and who do not simultaneously expect miracles from teachers who can only do so much.
Good luck.
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