How To Prevent Mental And Emotional Health Issues In Our Next Generation
How can we prevent the next generation from living with mental and emotional health issues?
Is that possible? Yes!! The next generation can be healthy mentally and emotionally. Still, it will take a committed group effort from everyone, from parents to educators to the healthcare industry, to make this happen.
Characteristics Of A Person Living In A Healthy Mental And Emotional State
- Having a healthy self-esteem
- Setting healthy boundaries
- Managing emotions in a healthy way
- Having healthy stress management skills
- Having confidence in their decision-making ability
- Healthy communication and positive interpersonal relationships
- Feeling happy and content with life
- A healthy sense of validation
- Having a healthy self-confidence
- Having strong coping skills
- Living with purpose
- Having empathy and compassion toward yourself and others
- Knowing your self worth
- Having a healthy mental and emotional well being
What Are The Steps To Nurturing A Healthy Next Generation
It all starts at home, and the responsibility, first and foremost, falls on the parents. At LNJ Life Coaching, we are creating awareness regarding parent-child bonding and its importance for the child’s healthy psychological development.
Secondly, parents, educators, and caregivers must be aware of children’s brain development and how the parent’s relationship with the child and their environment will significantly affect their behavior, attitude, and outlook on life as adults.
This education includes learning about creating affection, affirmation, wise discipline, and the critical bonding process crucial for the child’s healthy brain development.
Most importantly, the father-child relationship is responsible for the essential bonding process the child needs to develop healthily.
The Crucial Bonding Process For The Child’s Brain Development
Why is the bonding process essential? In the womb, as the baby develops, his or her brain begins to make connections. And as they are born, hormones and chemicals are responsible for creating specific “maps” in the child’s brain. So, for example, at a very early age, the brain begins to map out attachment with either the father or the mother.
The hormone needed to create the attachment between baby and parent is Oxytocin. Mothers produce the hormones naturally through breastfeeding, and the father also activates the hormone when he begins to cuddle and play with the baby.
The hormone oxytocin is a critical hormone that creates a lasting bond between the parent and child, but also it has a long-lasting positive effect on the child as they grow into an adult. Some benefits include building trust and healthy communication; it builds empathy and promotes positive social interactions.
Other chemicals activated during the bonding process include Serotonin, Endorphins, and Dopamine. These chemicals have an essential function they play in brain development and the overall function of people. As a psychologist, my research suggests that the bonding process is between 0 years old to 21 years old.
What Happens When The Bonding Process Is Interrupted?
When there is no bonding between parent and child, that may indicate trauma. However, some trauma may be as subtle as when the parents become emotionally detached from the child and find it difficult to show affection towards them because of the parent’s own traumatic experiences growing up.
With that said, there may be other traumatic experiences the child may go through breaking the bonding process, such as
- Strict parenting
- Disapproving parents
- Lack of communication with the child (freely expressing their needs and wants and laughter)
- Dismissive parents
- Verbal abuse
- Physical abuse
- Parental invalidation
- Indifferent parents
- Unsupportive parents
- Parents who don’t affirm
- Parental neglect (directly/indirectly)
- Parental abandonment (directly/indirectly)
These are experiences/upbringing that have adverse effects on the child’s brain development, affecting their psychological and social health in the process.
When a child goes through a traumatic experience, their “fight or flight” response is activated, and a surge of Adrenaline and Cortisol goes through the body in response to the threat. But, naturally, our Adrenaline and Cortisol level drops to normal levels after the danger has passed. But when the body perceives a constant danger, the fear center continues to blink, and high levels of Adrenaline and Cortisol surge in the bloodstream, also impacting the brain.
When Adrenaline and Cortisol hormones continue to surge in the bloodstream, they affect brain development, and later in life, as the child grows into an adult, they may develop psychological and physical side effects such as
- Unhealthy fear
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Insecurity
- Social anxiety
- Co-dependency
- Low self-esteem
- Heart disease
- Digestive issues
- Obesity
- High blood pressure
If your life is high-stress and always in high gear, your body may constantly pump out cortisol.
Therapy For All
In my assessment, it is safe to say that most of the population may need to talk to a therapist about their traumatic experiences and symptoms. Especially if you desire to be a parent in the future, you would want to be mentally and emotionally healthy to nurture and healthily raise children.
Again, is it possible to raise the next generation of mentally and emotionally healthy adults? Again, the answer is a resounding yes!! But, it will take a collaborative effort between parents, educators, physicians, the government, and the therapy industry, arming them with the proper awareness and knowledge of what’s needed for children to develop in a healthy way.
If you are looking to talk to a therapist, please get in touch with us at lnjlifecoaching@gmail.com
