Youth Mental Health

Year 3, Week 03 (157 total reports)

03.05.2023-09.05.2023

REVIEW and ANNOUNCEMENTS

Role Modeling, Forgiveness, Cognitive Flexibility, what habits do you want to practice and model this week?

This Week’s Top Links

09.05.2023

How To Raise A Good Kid

https://www.fatherly.com/parenting/how-to-raise-a-good-kid-modeling-moral-behavior

This article is about modeling and expands on the idea of what is a “Good Kid.”. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth I found in this link. Modeling courtesy, resilience, empathy; it’s worth taking time to read this if you are parenting children or working with them in some other way. To my friends in youth advocacy, pin this short article to the wall of the break room or anyplace that staff might read and discuss it. Use it as a basis for an upcoming staff meeting and give people sticky notes to generate ideas for modeling these behaviors.

08.05.2023

Forgiveness can boost happiness, improve mental health: 5 steps to get started

https://apple.news/AtxZdgGAHQ3i8X3Kvy7WYiQ

Perhaps one of the most freeing actions we can take as adults is to forgive our parents and realize they did the best they could with what they knew. We also hope that this is a point our children reach fairly early in their lives; hopefully in adolescence, but certainly in their young adulthood. It’s impossible to be mature friends with children or anyone who knows our buttons” without a healthy dose of forgiveness.

07.05.2023

Cognitive flexibility is essential to navigating a changing world – new research shows how your brain learns new rules

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/05/cognitive-flexibility-is-essential-to-navigating-a-changing-world-new-research-in-mice-shows-how-your-brain-learns-new-rules/

Looking back up at the first link and remembering that modeling is really the primary tool of parenting, leadership or teaching, it is worth asking ourselves how we can model cognitive flexibility and help young people identify that trait when they display or witness it. This article says that cognitive flexibility is essential to navigating a changing world, I would go as far as to say it is primary.

06.05.2023

The Only Way Out of the Child-Gender Culture War

https://apple.news/A6PSYuTtfTI2hSASg_zoTcQ

What is it about gender identity and development that scares misogynistic politicians like Trump, Abbott and DeSantis? It is alarming to think that gender (and pelvic) issues have been at the core of every authoritarian regime dating back before Hitler and Stalin along with race and immigration. This is not a new chapter in their “distraction playbook.’ It would serve us all to remember that when you don’t have true substance with which to lead others, you distract people and make them afraid.

05.05.2023

A Country Governed by Fear

https://apple.news/AaKNJh6p8QbaChXjQdeX-hw

Is fear the new “base” emotion in our public encounters today? Who benefits when we are afraid? Whose politics promote distrust in the false wrapping that we must constantly protect ourselves—even to the point of taking someone’s life; on a subway, at the doorway, at a birthday party, at shopping malls, throughout our communities? We can’t just blame this behavior on COVID, incivility was beginning to emerge and cause problems long before that. It begins with a lack of civility and creating closed-minded concepts of us vs. them.

04.05.2023

How To Raise An Adventurous Kid (But Not A Risk-Seeking Lunatic)

https://www.fatherly.com/parenting/how-to-raise-adventurous-kid

No risk, no growth. How do we model to young people that failure is to be learned from and even celebrated? How do we diminish the falsehood of perfection or even that “we are what we succeed at?” Much of this begins with what we praise as adults. Praise effort, not accomplishment. When we say, “you are a great artist,” a child may never pick up a pencil, crayon or pen again, for fear of not being “great.” Instead, be specific and praise the effort involved. “I can see you spent a lot of time studying how to draw hands and faces, your efforts really show in the result of your work. Tell me what you worked on hardest in this drawing?”

03.05.2023

Loneliness is the new silent killer, and as deadly as smoking: US surgeon-general

https://globalnews.ca/news/9666941/loneliness-deadly-smoking-surgeon-general-us/

Political or religious reasoning that is fear-based creates an environment of distrust. An environment of distrust lends itself to isolation. Isolation results in loneliness. The US Surgeon-General tells us that loneliness is an epidemic in the US. What actions could you take today to be more inviting, to increase the level of trust in your classroom, facility or community? When developing school programs to reduce violence, we used to emphasize “intentional courtesy,” especially to the vulnerable; “Go out of your way to be kind to the lonely, the sad and EVEN the mad…” We sent older kids to grade schools to become ambassadors of courtesy and brought community members into our schools to be “Golden Greeters” modeling courtesy at the doors to both staff and children.