How can maintaining your mental health help your kids?
You don’t have to be perfect, nor do you always have to be happy to help your kids. Help your kids gain good mental health habits by showing them you look after yourself. You can set your kids up for a healthy, happy future. Portraying a false reality where everything is fine and you are always in tip-top condition adds pressure to be ‘okay’.
How can you help children with their wellbeing?
With every action you take – you show them maintaining good mental health is a case of building habits, and that will support your family mental health as a whole. It takes time – especially if you’ve been in a rut or through a patch of poor mental health. If kids see you take a step back after a rough day – and say “I need to take some time for myself after that” – they learn that it’s okay to look after themselves. To care about their own wellbeing. When family mental health support is often in short supply – you are leading by example. By identifying your needs – you help them to recognise their own needs too!
Life takes so many twists and turns that I don’t think it would be possible for anyone to always be mentally healthy! Like being an athlete, or staying healthy in other aspects of your life, small regular actions help. Children’s mental health is more important than ever – after a turbulent few years and a global pandemic meaning families across the globe have had a reasonably unstable time – demonstrating that it’s okay to look after yourself, and to be up and down is reassuring! 
Bring family mental health into conversation:
To help children with anxiety, or bring mental wellbeing up so that it’s something you’re all more aware of, you don’t have to start having serious dinner table chats. You can ease into things and try some really simple activities like these:
- Dinner chats about how you are feeling today – you can lead
- Discussing what you are doing to keep yourself feeling good
- Identify what stresses you out and ask the kids what they think you could do – involve them in being solution-focused, and if they have a bad day, week or month they have already seen you asking for help
- Use emotion cards or mood journals, there are loads available for different age ranges.
The more accessible talking about how you are feeling is, the easier it will be to have those conversations. This makes it easier to help your kids gain good mental health habits, rather than bottling things up or feeling as though they have to be fine all the time. Like anything, it can be easier said than done. But with consistency and constant reminders – even your teenagers can take this on board. Especially during those years, it can be hard to feel like looking after yourself. But they may need to see you doing this more than ever.
In conclusion – you can ditch the parent guilt around taking time out for yourself, you don’t need hours to spend on self-care, but you need to look after yourself. Truly cliche: you can’t pour from an empty cup! By looking after yourself, the future versions of your kids will gain good mental health habits because they’ve learnt from you! If you’re struggling with ideas on how you can spend just a short amount of time looking after yourself – download my free guide – 10 ways to take 10mins. You are showing them that it is okay, and really quite necessary. It’s not just for your own mental health as a parent, but for theirs too.
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