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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.
About the author
TelepsychHealth
Published by the TelepsychHealth clinical team — evidence-based mental health guidance reviewed by licensed psychiatric providers.