Depression and the Modern World

By: Asma Shums, Mortgage Broker
The growing awareness of mental health in our society is a long time coming. We often hear about children and young adults experiencing depression, anxiety, or other mental illnesses that affect them negatively. There are numerous articles on the adverse effects on children’s mental health and effectiveness of various types of interventions that have proven to be successful. As adults and parents, we can often relate to their life experiences and experiences and are responsible to some degree to create a society where we promote healthy living a positive environment.
The risk factors that affect children and mental health are: poverty, occupational difficulties, poor parent-child communication, and substance abuse by parents, hostile parental behavior, and single-parent family situations.
These risk factors clearly have a common theme of stress placed on the child during their formative years. This can create behavioural, mental, and social changes in children that often go undiagnosed and affect them throughout their adult life.
Positive Preventive Factors:
•Warm and positive parental relationship
•Help that is easily accessible through immediate family
•Sense of being loved and respected by their parents
•Positive self-esteem and peer relationships
•Interest in their school and the successes they face
•Healthy engagement with adults and children outside the home
•Parental employment
•Parents who hold positive and healthy relationships with others outside the home
Implementing some rules and changes of behaviors that relate to the positive factors above can create massive changes in your child. Having a house that reflects these proven positive preventive factors increase the likelihood that your child will be resilient, positive, healthy, and empathetic to others in their life.
Let’s take this approach to change our parenting where it needs help. The road won’t be easy and parents will often face guilt, anger, sadness, fear, and anxiety from their children. It’s important to keep the end goal in mind of having your child’s best interest in mind. Empower yourself to empower your children. End the stigma with mental illnesses in our communities.
Info::asmashums@gmail.com