The best way to promote children’s mental health is to build up their strengths, help to protect them from risks, and give them tools to succeed in life.
- Help children relate to others and build their confidence. Give children a chance to talk about experiences and feelings; offer encouragement and praise; acknowledge positive and negative behavior; and provide consistent and fair expectations with clear consequences for misbehavior.
- Be a role model. Talk about your own feelings, apologize when you are wrong, don’t express anger with violence, and use active problem-solving skills.
- Encourage exercise and sports. Researchers have linked a variety of psychological benefits to exercise, including decreased depression and anxiety, and improved mood states, self-confidence, sense of life-quality, and general psychological well-being. Participation in exercise and sports has also been shown to reduce delinquent behavior and boost academic performance.
- Suggest involvement in after-school activities. A questionnaire on body image and self-esteem found that girls who were active in a greater number of after-school activities had higher body image, self-esteem, and feelings of competence than girls who participated in fewer.
- Encourage strong family relationships. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston found that adolescents who were from closely knit families and maintained an intimate connection with their parents based on trust and open communication were less likely to use alcohol.
- High expectations can go a long way. Studies indicate that high parental or family expectations for a child’s performance may serve as a protective factor against child substance abuse.