A front-page article in last Friday’s Telegraph referred to the escalating volume of mental health difficulties in children. Unsurprisingly ministers stated their opinions about perceived solutions, in this case developing ‘more grit’ in children. Their opinions may have been effective in raising the ministerial and party profiles but are likely to be much less effective in improving children’s mental health.
I have been predicting the rise in children’s psychological difficulties for over three decades and have invested energy in understanding and implementing preventative measures which empower children to handle life in a positive and proactive way.
Rather than allowing the problem to escalate and then showing them how to handle their psychological symptoms, wouldn’t our children have been better off if we had provided them with mental strength decades ago?
If we are to strengthen our children’s minds, we will need to use a different paradigm (unconscious mindset) than the paradigm which has generated the current mental health epidemic in schools.
You can see that the current paradigm has been written into the Telegraph article through several flawed assumptions:
1. The children have psychological problems, the solution lies in ‘fixing the problem in the children’.
Creating the impression that our children’s psychological disturbance should be fixed by treating children’s symptoms demonstrates a fundamental lack of systemic thinking. By far the largest cause of psychological distress, both in adults and in children, can be traced to the paradigms which are developed by our social culture, the modus operandi of schools, parenting and the culture prevalent in the household in which the child is raised.
If we want to improve mental health in children it will be necessary to look at ‘adult contributions’ rather than teaching children to cope with symptoms which are originated by adults.
2. Children need to learn how to develop more ‘grit’
Again the assumption is that the lack of grit is a ‘fault in the child’. Wouldn’t we be better off looking at how we have raised children with a shortage of the required grit?
This one dimensional suggestion overlooks a range of other personal capabilities which are central to developing children with healthy paradigms for life.
If we disempower our children by overloading them with academic education in content which will not be useful to them in later life, we take away the opportunity to build our children stronger minds.
3. Improving the mental health of children is the means to improve adult mental health
Most people know that the vast majority of our children’s paradigms are ‘imprinted’ from their parents’ paradigm during their early years. The imprinting phenomenon does not discriminate which part of the adult’s paradigm are productive and which parts will undermine mental health. The imprinting phenomena includes parental psychological quirks and neuroses so children learn neurotic behaviour from their parents.
To suggest that we will do a really efficient job of strengthening children’s minds while their parental role models demonstrate poor mental health is delusional. To facilitate the mental strengthening of adults I designed a mental fitness programme Optimising Your Own Performance results of which can be found here.
Countless parents have confirmed to me that although they promised themselves they would avoid passing the quirks inherited from their parents. In reality they found that what they really needed was a comprehensive system for parenting their children so that they become capable functional adults.
Mental healthcare paradigms tend to focus on diagnosing disorder and showing people how to ‘cope’ and manage their symptoms. From a paradigm perspective this responsive approach implies that we will spend much our lifetime developing and coping with psychological difficulties.
If we are to alleviate negative mental health trends, both in adults and young people, we will need to use a more comprehensive and systemic approach. By showing the majority how to adapt their own paradigm we can enable people to take responsibility for alleviating the probability of mental health disturbance.
If you are a parent who wants to give your child a better start in life you can join me on the a Build Your Child a Stronger Mind webinar.
If you are an educator who wants to make a more solid contribution to your students mental wellbeing in the first instance you can contact me on LinkedIn.
If you are the kind of person who wants to get involved in driving the solution, join me to know how a paradigm centred approach provides far more effective solutions not only in schools and the mental health of adults but also in business and our wider society.
