Thursday, 19 May 2016

My thoughts on the importance of children's emotional well being


I have been thinking about the tragic news that I read on Thursday night about an 11 year old boy fell to his death on a normal school morning following arguments with parents. Most of us blame the academic stress placed upon children and parents. We also remind ourselves not to push our children too hard. But I have been thinking is such a self reminder really enough to prevent such tragedy from recurring?

Perhaps there are something deeper that requires our attention. Relating to the recent suicidal case of a secondary school boy alleged of molestation and rising youth suicidal cases in recent years, I felt that these children's emotional well beings may have been compromised to a large extent for such tragedies to repeatedly happen.

I am not a child psychology expert, I could only imagine the intensity of the desperation and helplessness these children might have felt before they took that plunge; these intense emotions were more than what the children could bear and rendered them blind of the otherwise apparent fact that their parents value their life more than anything in the world. I could only assume with a heavy heart that the deep entrenchment in the intense negative emotions were the last feelings of these young and innocent lives. As adults we also get entrenched at times and we walk out of it as our mind came to senses eventually. What about the fragile mind of children? Do they have the maturity required to perceive what has happened objectively and recognize that life is more than what they were experiencing at that moment in time?

I recently read that human being's brains are not fully developed until the age of mid-twenties, especially the part that is responsible for higher level thinking, such as logic, reasoning, self regulating, decision making etc. In other words, children are still children, no matter how rapidly they grow and how well they can read and write. We have placed expectations that are too high and unrealistic upon them. We expect them to be good at study, sociable, sporty, have one or two interests, have good morale values, independent in their endeavor etc etc, the list goes on. In all, we expect them to be perfect or near perfect, but we forget they are just children. (All right, I am guilty of having that long list of the unrealistic expectations and forgetting that my children are just children, often.)

To fulfill our expectations, we have given our children the opportunity to master all the essential skills early in their lives. But have we taught them how to deal with these high expectations and the associated stress and negative emotions? Have we made sure that our children are emotionally well to be able to recognize that the setbacks and the intense emotion associated are only a passing phase of their life and they do not represent his entire being?

There have been focus on developing children holistically, but I think there has not been enough emphasis on taking care of children’s emotional well being. Perhaps such tragedy will serve as wake up calls to the policy makers to devise programs to educate parents and children to take care of our children’s emotional well-being. Such program should include some essential knowledge about human psychology with focus on emotional well being. These programs should help children not only to cope with today’s stress from exams, but also to better prepare them for the future when they start to work and have their own family. These basic knowledge on human psychology should help these future parents to be better equipped to watch out and protect their own children's well being. But I am not sure when that will happen. 

Meanwhile, I think we as parents can do our part to protect our children's emotional well-being right from this moment. If you are interested, you may want to check out this for a book that I recently read and found very useful in this regard. 

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