How To Teach Your Kids To Manage Their Mental Wellness

Every generation grows up in a different world from their parents. Over recent years, however, the pace of change has just kept on getting faster and faster. This means that it’s even more important for you to teach your kids how to manage their mental wellness. Here are some tips to help.

Teach them about the link between body and mind

Having a healthy body doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a healthy mind (or vice versa). It is, however, a really good place to start. When you know that you’re ill or injured, the effect on your mind is often fairly obvious. The major problem tends to be when you’re not at your best but you don’t quite realize it or know what’s wrong.

In adults, a bad diet and bad habits can be the issue here. This can also be the case with children but it’s less likely. Adults will have a lot of control over what they eat. They should also be too young to have picked up bad habits. The main culprit tends to be a lack of high-quality sleep.

Children need this even more than adults. That said, adults definitely need it too. Make sure that your children understand this and know how to get it. If necessary, adjust their bedrooms to promote good sleep for them.

Get them into journaling and habit-tracking

If you can get your children into journaling and habit-tracking while they’re young, they could reap the benefits throughout their lives. Firstly, journaling is a way for people to express their emotions. It’s more than just a factual diary (although it can be that too). It’s a way of capturing how you were feeling on a particular day, the highs as well as the lows.

Journaling can be a useful way of mood-tracking. Alternatively, you can teach your children to include mood-tracking with habit-tracking. It’s up to you what habits you track. From a wellness perspective, these could include food and drink habits (e.g. water, caffeine, and sugar intake) plus exercise and sleep.

Tracking your moods and habits builds up records over time which can allow you to see patterns and connections. It also encourages your children to be mindful of what they do. For example, if they’re overdoing the caffeine (e.g. when studying) it will become very obvious very quickly.

Make sure they know how to get help

Obviously, prevention is better than cure. With the best will and teaching in the world, however, the reality is that some children are going to need some extra help. This could mean anything from online counseling to real-world treatment at American Addiction Centers. As a parent, this thought may be heartbreaking for you but it needn’t be.

Recognition and understanding of mental health have both improved massively over the years. There are now a variety of treatment options available. This means that there’s an excellent chance your children will be able to find something which suits their needs. You may need to try a few different options before you find the right one but at least the options are there.