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Therapy
How to speak with your child about mental health
Build strong relationships, open communication. Foster trust, security, and acceptance.
- Healthy communication with your child starts with a strong relationship.
- To build a strong relationship, prioritize time with your child and foster acceptance. Build fun activities together into your schedule.
- To start building good communication habits, you want to create an experience that your child will want to repeat with you. Your child wants to feel heard.
- One effective way to make the other person feel heard is to practice paraphrasing some of what your child had said.
- Some teens can be fairly uncommunicative at times, but luckily, this is temporary. Don’t use a direct approach confronting your child about this, but continue to talk to them with positive cues.
- Continue to ask questions, even if you feel they are not interested in communicating.
- Ask about depression and anxiety and how it can impact them.
- Ask them if they are interested in talking to a professional about these feelings.
- Tell them if they start to have thoughts of hurting themselves, to tell someone.
- Instill a sense of hope, that there are other options available if they want to talk to someone about these.
Talk with a board-certified psychiatric provider — from home
TelepsychHealth offers online psychiatry and therapy for adults in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Texas. We are in-network with most major insurance plans.
About the author
Bruce Bassi, M.S., M.D.
Founder and Medical Director of TelepsychHealth. Board-certified addiction psychiatrist caring for patients in ten states by secure video.