Children often struggle with huge feelings that they simply can’t express. When a child is completely overwhelmed but unable to verbalize their feelings, their actions may become hostile or even dangerous to themselves and those around them. Maintaining mental health may take professional help.
Pressure On the Family
Whether you are a single parent or a two-parent family, your family has been under a great deal of pressure for years now. The events of 2020 may have impacted you financially. These financial pressures may well have gotten worse in the past years.
Even if your family hasn’t struggled to maintain a healthy financial outlook, you may have had a hard time handling the social isolation and personal upheaval of these events. No matter how hard you work to shield your children from these pressures, they likely have felt some of the tension you’ve suffered.
Maintain a Regular Schedule at Home
To support younger children through difficult changes, it’s important to maintain as many routines as possible. Even if one adult in the household needs to take an evening job, do your best to make sure that bath and bedtime are the same. If you can’t eat together as a family seven days a week, do your best to eat a meal together each weekend so everyone can catch up.
Older children may need other support. An older child may have a hard time sharing tough feelings with a parent or grandparent. Another family member or adult can offer a place to release feelings or problem-solve, either in person or over the phone. One of the hardest things for a parent to do is to back away from a struggling child and offer them privacy in such conversations. Focus on your child’s safety and let them verbally problem-solve with another adult.
Offer Privacy with Support
When adults around children are stressed, older children may pull away from their parents. Give your children privacy and work to engage professional help. A trusted counselor, teacher, or coach may also help you check on your older child without impinging on their privacy.
Support New Friendships
Children may also notice that other children are under extreme stress. Friends may have moved away. In such cases, doing your best to make your home a welcoming place for new friends can lower the pressure of loneliness.
Older children may have lost out on the option to socialize or connect away from school because of scheduling pressure on families. Work to build family game nights or other shared experiences, such as making pizzas or popcorn together for family movie night.
Peer Pressure Concerns
Understand that your child may also be bearing the burdens of changing friendships. If your child has a friend who is in real emotional trouble, they may need information about crisis care from you. To properly protect your child from a terrible loss, do your best to give them some sort of communication outlet.
Keeping children emotionally and mentally safe will become more difficult as they connect with new people and grow socially. Building a tight-knit family through shared experiences is an ideal way to support your children. Showing them that there is no shame in seeking out support for mental health at any age will reduce their risk of dangerous isolation.
