This Children’s Mental Health Week (9th-15th February), mental health expert Noel McDermott looks at the core aspects of a child’s life that are important from a mental health perspective and offers advice on how families can help improve their children’s health and wellbeing..
Noel comments: “As a parent you can map these visually as an image or write up as a narrative: 1 – skills, knowledge, past achievements and personality qualities and 2) social capital in the form of friends, family, school, clubs, activities and interests. Looking at these means you can help yourself and your children, it’s also key in building a much more holistic picture of your kids when looking at their problems and helping them deal with them”.
How to improve children’s mental health as a family
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Connections to others – strong networks of engaged, loving and supportive people in our lives is an absolute must, prosocial activity and activity in groups is highly rewarding neurologically. Families and children with a lot of connections to others are healthier by design. Networks form on the basis of an overlap of shared values, purpose (activities, interests) and proximity. Proximity is often the key feature in developing friendships for example, so look local for these opportunities!
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Active lifestyle – the single biggest health improvement you can make is to have regular exercise as a family, ideally 3 times a week for 20 minutes, raising your heartbeat is what you want to aim for, anymore and that’s a bonus! Getting out, being active, participating in sports activities maintain overall health and wellbeing. For younger kids get out there and explore the play parks, jungle gyms etc For older kids get them joining activity groups, paddle boarding, canoeing, outward bound, hill walking, survival camps etc. Other great boosts for mental health with older kids are boxing, kickboxing etc as learning how to manage aggression is so important. High intensity activities such as this as well as HIIT help manage stress hormone build up. Stress hormones have a huge negative impact on mental health.
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Being of service to others – no matter what your life circumstances, someone has it tougher. Helping others is a sure fire, evidence based way to psychological wellbeing so reach out to that neighbour that seems to live alone, chat to your elderly neighbours at the corner shop, offer to help out at a local charity.
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Nature and horticulture – there is significant and growing evidence of the benefits of nature to humans. Nature also means horticulture and getting involved in local community gardens, gardening at home on your windowsill will bring significant rewards in health and wellbeing. For kids with ASD and/or ADHD diagnosis for example, nature or garden based activities are shown to be helpful in directly improving mood but equally significant in building social capital.
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Improve your diet – having a healthy balanced diet contributes massively to a healthy mind and body. When preparing family meals try to reduce processed foods, eat a mix of 80-20 vegetables and fruit to meat, control portion size and reduce sugar. Make sure you have regular family meal times together.
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Practice good sleep hygiene – this is essential to healthy living. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture due to the psychological consequences of missing REM sleep cycles. So, work together to practice good hygiene in your sleep habits; don’t drink stimulants at night, exercise, have a simple and regular bedtime routine, reduce blue screen activity at night and don’t use your phones in bed.
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DOSE yourself up! Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins are reward hormones that promote health and wellbeing and engaging in activities that promote these will make life much more pleasant and rewarding. Some of these hormones you will get from the lifestyle medicine suggestions, endorphins come from exercise for example but using the DOSE mnemonic you can get more bang for your buck, for example, if you start running together as a family you will get plenty of endorphins, if you add running outside you will get extra serotonin hormones for free. So, learning your DOSE activities really can pay off hugely.
Looking at your child and yourself in the round isn’t a secondary activity in terms of mental health, it’s a core aspect of long-term sustainable change and improvement in health and wellbeing and a great way of planning a healthy lifestyle around your child’s strengths and interests. Health built in this way is self sustaining as motivating activities.
Here are some evidence-based tips that work to help with family health and wellbeing:
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Get educated – psychological education is vital and the UK has a huge set of resources from NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence). If you want to know about a condition don’t randomly google, search via NICE e.g., NICE guidance on children and depression.
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Learn CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) as it was designed to be used by lay people and it is a set of techniques, tools and behaviours that manage and prevent psychological distress. MIND have some great signposts here or you can buy Mind Over Mood which is a central workbook full of loads of practical exercises.
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Learn MBCT (mindfulness based cognitive behavioural therapy) Jon Kabbat-Zim is the go-to person here and also follow the advice above NICE advises it for less severe depression for example. MIND has some great resources here.
Mental health expert Noel McDermott is a psychotherapist and dramatherapist with over 30 years’ work within the health, social care, education, and criminal justice fields. His company Mental Health Works provides unique mental health services for the public and other organisations. Mental Health Works offers in situ health care and will source, identify and coordinate personalised teams to meet your needs