What’s inside this article: A look at what factors most significantly impact a child’s emotional health, one aspect of mental health, and what you can do as a parent to set them up for a lifetime of emotional wellbeing.
Emotional health is one aspect of mental health – emotionally healthy people have good coping abilities for managing negative emotions. Emotional health affects emotional regulation, resilience, self-awareness, and mindset.
Your child’s emotional health starts developing during early childhood and plays a role in how well kids manage their emotions and build resilience.
If a strong foundation is not in place, children can experience long-term impacts on their emotional health and well-being.
Researchers found three factors that most significantly impact emotional health in children:
- Having a close relationship with their parents
- Receiving appropriate parenting
- Have strong social-emotional skills
That means parents can do a lot to help their children. Forming a strong connection with your child, using positive parenting strategies, and teaching kids to identify and manage their emotions can set them up for a lifetime of emotional well-being.
Note: It’s important to note that being emotionally healthy doesn’t mean you’ll be happy all the time or that you won’t experience mental health challenges. It does mean you have the skills to manage your emotions and know to seek additional mental health support if you need it.
How can you strengthen your child’s emotional health? These tips can help:
How to Strengthen Your Child’s Emotional Health
Connecting With Your Child:
You probably already have a solid connection to your child. But there are many ways to increase the connection you already have.
Make time for your children.
We are all busy and might have schedules that are all over the place, which sometimes makes it more difficult for parents to spend quality time with their children. However, making time will help your child connect with you.
If you have more than one child, fitting in just 10-15 minutes of one-on-one time with each can help significantly. Use this time to laugh, talk, read books, or do something together you both enjoy.
We make this work in our house by staggering the kids’ bedtimes and wake-up times and doing individual parent-child “dates.”
Make your child feel important.
When children feel important, they know they are loved and connected with their parents even when they aren’t receiving their direct attention.
When this is the case, kids become more confident doing things independently and build stronger self-esteem. Kids with confidence and high self-esteem are more resilient and have a more positive mindset.
There are so many simple ways to help your child feel more important, and most of them only take a minute of your time.
Here are a few things you can do that have a significant impact:
- Leave notes in their lunch.
- Let them overhear you bragging about them.
- Share memories with them from when they were babies
- Eat dinner together as often as possible.
- Create family rituals together – these are things like taco Tuesday or wearing pajamas every Sunday.
- Ask questions that show you’re interested in their lives. Instead of “how was your day?”, ask for more detail, like “How did your presentation go?”
- Be affectionate. An extra hug, kiss, hand squeeze, pat on the shoulder, etc., are all simple ways to increase affection and make your child feel important.
- Start a hobby you can do together. This is most fun when you try something that neither of you has done before. You could start a vegetable garden or begin taking a morning run together.
- Take on a craft or DIY project as a team. Anything from making simple crafts together to letting them help you re-finish the kitchen cupboards, being a part of your project will have them feeling more important than ever.
- Sing together
- Ask your child for their opinion – Ask them what outfit they like best, what they want for dinner, or what they think would be a fun activity for the family vacation.
Effective Parenting for Emotional Health
There is no one correct way to be a parent. All parents and children are unique, and so is their dynamic.
Despite those differences, how we parent is similar enough that researchers have identified four distinct parenting styles. If you’re interested, you can learn about those here.
Authoritative parenting is most beneficial for your child’s emotional health.
Authoritative parents provide their children with clear and consistent boundaries. Their expectations are high and reinforced using positive parenting strategies.
Expectations and boundaries are developmentally appropriate, and communication is open. Parents are willing to negotiate and problem-solve with their children.
Authoritative parents are supportive, affectionate, nurturing, and reasonable. In other words, they’re emotionally in tune with their children.
Communication
The most important part of parenting for emotional health is not dismissing feelings.
Children need to know that all feelings are normal and valid. Punishing young children for their big feelings or sending them away to their bedrooms alone when they’re upset teaches them that their feelings should be hidden away or they’re wrong.
Feelings are always valid. But most kids believe that happy feelings are good and sad/mad feelings are bad because of how adults react to those feelings.
Generally, when there’s an issue, it’s with the child’s behavioral response to their big emotions, not with the emotion itself.
When children have big behavioral outbursts, it’s usually because they don’t know how to express their big feelings any other way or don’t understand what they’re feeling or why. This triggers their fight or flight instinct; it’s not a conscious choice.
Even kids who generally communicate well struggle when having heightened emotions.
Comforting your child, guiding them through their emotions while holding boundaries, and demonstrating effective communication and coping skills lays the groundwork for raising emotionally healthy kids.
Emotion Coaching
Emotion coaching is a step-by-step process of guiding your child through intense emotions by validating, relating, naming the emotion, and holding boundaries. It’s a co-regulation strategy that teaches children how to self-regulate over time.
Emotion coaching is a highly effective way to help your child understand their feelings while validating their emotions (not their behavior) and demonstrating effective communication strategies.
You can read more on how to use emotional coaching here.
Social-Emotional Learning
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is the process of learning and applying the skills necessary to manage emotions, have self-awareness and social awareness, and show empathy.
SEL is necessary to maintain positive relationships, develop decision-making skills, develop perspective-taking skills, and build emotional intelligence.
This all impacts emotional health.
Social-Emotional Learning is a lifelong process because we constantly learn new ways to relate to and interact with others. But you can help lay the foundation in your child’s early years by doing SEL activities at home.
There are lifelong benefits to using positive parenting strategies, developing a solid connection with your child, and implementing social-emotional learning from a young age.
In studies involving 270,000 students, those who participated in an SEL program show an 11% gain in academic performance.
The benefits continue into adulthood. Social-emotional learning decreased the likelihood of living in or being on a waiting list for public housing, receiving public assistance, having any involvement with police before adulthood, and ever spending time in a detention facility.
Read the 2015 national study published in the American Journal of Public Health.