When kids get a cut, most of them will instinctively ask for a band-aid, because as they are growing up we teach them how to take care of basic injuries. We know how important it is to take care of our bodies and we instil this in our children from a young age. There are regular subjects in school about health and the importance of physical activity for keeping your body healthy and yet both at home and at school we seem to entirely neglect mental wellbeing. If ever young people are taught about mental health, there tends to be a focus on mental illness rather than everyday healthy thinking and how to keep their minds healthy. In light of this it is unsurprising that when it comes to mental wellbeing young people report less than ideal levels, because we’ve never taught them how to improve it!

The psychologist Guy Winch makes a compelling case for why we should treat our mental wellbeing with the same importance as we do our physical wellbeing (watch his talk here). He explains that we can sustain mental injuries just as easily as we can physical ones. In particular situations that cause feelings of rejection, loneliness and failure are particularly good at reducing our self-esteem and making us feel terribly about ourselves. Without the proper tools to manage the impact of a stressful life event we can unintentionally twist the knife deeper, making that psychological wound so much worse and in many cases this is what we do. For example, following a failed attempt at something we allow ourselves to have thoughts like “you overestimated yourself” and “of course that didn’t work it was a stupid idea”, but how different might life be if we instead knew how to properly treat the psychological wound that we have sustained?

The unfortunate reality is that our children will experience challenging situations as they grow and transition through schooling and into the world. The good news is that wellbeing is teachable, and by teaching them the skills to keep their mind healthy they will have a buffer against hard times.

So how should we be teaching them to keep their minds healthy?

Self-compassion

Following an emotional wound like a rejection our self-esteem is in critical condition and we then tend to make it worse with our negative self-talk, therefore it is extremely important that we teach young people to think more positively about themselves, especially in tough times. Encourage them to notice when they might be thinking in ways that make themselves feel worse and instead try to think of what a kind friend might say to them. This will help train their thinking to be more compassionate rather than self-destructive.

Encourage a growth mindset

Following failure, the natural response is often to give up, but this is when they need to persevere the most! Encourage them to think about failures as ‘one off’ events that they can learn from rather than an indication that they will only fail if they try. Having a growth mindset is about believing that abilities can be developed and this leads to more persistence and embracing of challenges rather than fear and avoidance. In our house, when our children try new or challenging tasks they use the mantra “I will train my brain to be good at this” and if they don’t perform the way they hoped we say “well you just aren’t good at that yet”.

Develop emotional literacy

We all feel positive and negative emotions, but we also feel things beyond happy, sad, angry and mad. How many words do your children know to describe how they feel? If children can’t identify how they really feel, its difficult to adequately solve the challenges they experience. Try using an emotions chart to build the family emotion vocabulary.

These are just thre basic ways that we can begin to teach children to practice emotional first aid. If you are curious to know more Danielle Buckley will be holding a series of wellbeing retreats for girls and parents on positive and coaching psychology, see https://www.facebook.com/TheCoachingPsychologist/ for more details. Hit ‘like’ to stay updated on future events!