How Do Parents Affect Their Children's Mental Health

Have you ever wondered if something you said or didn't say might actually be affecting your child more than you realize? Many parents wonder this at certain times during parenting, especially when emotions are running high. I'm Nicoleen Peck and I help parents and families learn how to be calm and how to be strong emotionally as they're communicating through the difficult times. In this video, as we talk about how do parents affect their children's mental health, we're going to break down exactly what really does impact your child and what you can do to really help in those emotional moments. So a lot of people know that not only did I raise my four children, but for many years I did therapeutic treatment care for troubled teens. And a lot of them had traumatic backgrounds. There was abuse. There are also a lot of neurodiversities and ways where they saw the world through a different lens. So I had to try to help them through some pretty big emotions. And what I recognized at the beginning of my foster care journey was vital for helping me to really be successful as I went through my parenting years. So I guess it was a little bit lucky for me that I got to, I guess, practice on other people's children for a little bit as I was helping these foster children. But I definitely learned what not to do. So at first when they would do really rude behaviors, I would think to myself, this is rude. This is so annoying. How could they be that way to me when I'm sacrificing all of this time, all of this energy to try to serve them? But then I realized that was actually not going to help my relationship with them. Emotionally, when I started thinking about how their behavior affected me, I metaphorically took a step back. It felt like I was distancing myself from them. And these particular youth, they did not have good relationships in their past. They didn't know how to bond with people. In fact, what they needed more than anything else was actually good bonding. So when you say something to a child like, that's so rude, or, you know, quit it, just get out of my face, or whatever type of a thing that a person might say, or even if you just think it, it makes a difference in your bond, in your relationship. The number one need that a person has, and we're talking child, adult, anybody, the number one need they have is the feeling of belonging and bonding with another person. What you say, what you think about saying, actually can impact the attachment that you have with your child. This could make a difference on all the other teaching or other beautiful moments in the relationship that you're hoping to have. Now this doesn't mean that a child can't ever forgive you for one mistake, because they do, and they can. And thank goodness that when they're tiny, they forgive so often, because we mess up so many times as we're learning and growing as parents. But it does over time create more and more distance in the relationship, and parents soon find themselves looking what seems like from the outside on their child's life, and it feels distant and somehow uncomfortable, maybe even wrong, because they know that there should be some other level of connection there. So the first impact on your child's mental health is the impact on the child's connection, because the way that they're going to process the whole world around them actually comes back to their connection with you. Your parenting also impacts the way your child sees other people and interacts with other people. Your parenting can lead to understanding if it's wrapped in bonding, belonging, if the tone elements and the structural elements are good and solid, then it can lead your child to understanding other people better and understanding themselves better. We all want our children to have good relationships, right? So that means that they need to understand how other people tick. They're constantly watching us for social cues. They're constantly learning how to communicate with other people, how to listen, how to understand. By watching how we do those things with them, we are the ultimate example. That's our role, actually. I don't know if you know that, but we do have multiple different roles in our children's lives. In fact, after I wrote my first book, Parenting a House United, I realized that I needed to write this book, Roles. So the first book, Parenting a House United, goes into all the details about the skills that children need and the parents need to really be calm and get through the problems. But if the roles aren't in the right place, if you don't understand the power of your example, if you don't understand the way that they're looking at you, what they're hoping to get from you, and also if they don't understand what the other people in the family are hoping to get from them, there's a loss of identity in the family. I know that for years, people were rough on this word roles. They thought it meant like, you know, super gender-specific roles, or maybe there were super rigid responsibilities that a person had, but that's not really what roles mean. The word roles means who are you to that other person? What do they anticipate or hope to get from you, and are you actually fulfilling that need for them? It goes back to deeper identity in the family, and if we can establish that, then our children are going to find more comfort, more peace as they move forward in all of their relationships. So helping them understand each other goes back to their identity, goes back to family identity, but it also focuses on some skills that they are going to need in their communication. So as we're talking about what's really going to help your child most when they're seeking to understand others, and to keep those roles and identity established in the family, we've got to focus on some of our four basic skills of communication. So this whole channel is called Teaching Self-Government. I'm known actually around the world for the skills that I teach that are related to self-government, Some of those skills that are going to be very helpful right now for your child to learn are skills like how to disagree appropriately. That's going to seek to more understanding. That's going to help you understand them. That's going to help them understand you. That's going to help them understand their peers, because this is a skill that they can use in every relationship, every circumstance that they're in. It's just a life skill, and they can start learning it when they're babies. Even before they can use complete sentences, learning the concept of disagree appropriately is actually possible. Other skills like accepting no answers, accepting consequences, following instructions, seem like basic living skills, right? We have to be able to instruct ourselves, to motivate ourselves, those types of things. But also when we're talking about understanding other people, we might have to give ourselves a no answer on something we think. First, that first thought that's in our head, don't say it. Give yourself a no answer. That one's not productive. Okay, how should we communicate with a person so that we do understand them? We might have to give ourself an instruction for how to seek to understand that other person. So there are a lot of skills that are part of just good understanding, good communication. That's a game changer for the family. Parents may not realize that the way that you behave with the children, so meaning your tone, your delivery of instructions, teaching, correction, all those things that we have to do as parents, your tone or how they feel, that delivery teaches the child something. It gives a message to the child. Also the words that you choose to use. Now I don't want you to be so worried about all of that that you don't say anything because that also would give a message. If you don't say anything to your child, if you don't do any corrections or training, the child actually gets the unspoken message that you don't care and they actually need to be cared about. They crave teaching even though sometimes they push back against it. Don't forget that. Don't be thrown off by some of those emotions that might be coming back at you. So what type of messages do they get from your teaching? We already talked about understanding, but the way that you deliver your teaching to them, the skills that you present, the words that you share, teaches them whether they will be understood or not by you. This brings them a lot of peace because if they feel understood, suddenly they feel safe in the parent-child relationship. But if they don't feel understood, they don't feel safe. If you're volatile, if you are yelling things at them, if you are starting to get too emotional, you're not being calm in your parenting, then they distance themselves from you. They immediately think, I don't know if I can trust that person. That is really what happens. The trust is built in the moment of problem solving. Can I trust this person to help me solve my problems or are they going to say everything's my fault? That feeling of safety leads to a feeling of attachment. So there's kind of like this circle where it goes attachment, good communication, good understanding, safety, and then back to attachment again and again and again. But if I don't feel safe, I'm not going to attach. I actually heard a story recently about a young boy who was being raised by a mom, a single mom. She had a lot of boyfriends in and out of the house all the time. And she was into drugs, kind of a selfish lifestyle that she was living. And she got emotional probably because of the drugs a lot. And she probably had stresses in her life that she was trying to self-medicate with the drugs. And this young boy ended up beat a lot of times by the mother. He was talking about how she would come after him with broomsticks and stuff like that. And just seeing even as an adult explaining the story of his childhood, the terror, the feeling of not being safe. And then to see what happened in his life later. As he went down that road of, do I want to believe that somebody ever cares about me? Yes, I do. So he went toward God. Then he went away from God. Then he went toward drugs. Then he went, you know, trying to find that place where he could feel safe and cared for. Ultimately, he did find himself back with a community of people that truly did care, that would truly be a family to him like he didn't have. How sad is it to spend your whole life and to even get your health to such a place where you were suicidal and having all of these problems, all because you didn't have the right belonging, the right training, the right parenting when you were young. And it led to this downward spiral. That can happen to our children if we're not careful. So the good news is this, that if you've made mistakes, you're not alone. Like every parent makes mistakes at some point or another. The difference between the self-governed parent and the not self-governed parent is that you recognize when you made a mistake, when you did something that probably wasn't the right way to handle it, and then you take steps to fix it. If you're ready to take steps to fix it, this is the channel for you. This is the place that is going to really help you. In fact, I have a free gift for you that will start helping you with your calmness today so that you can communicate in a way that will be more beneficial for your relationship and for theirs. And it will help you solve the problems too. So I have a Calm Parenting Toolkit. It's on my website teachingselfgovernment.com. It's right on the homepage right now. It's for free. It's a 10-lesson toolkit. It's not the full Teaching Self-Government training. I don't want to, you know, lead you into thinking that that's the case. But it is a first introductory course to calmness that will give you 10 tools for calmness that you should be able to use today. So go to teachingselfgovernment.com. Get the Calm Parenting Toolkit today. I'll see you there.