The intergenerational transmission of mental health problems is something that is really foundational to a lot of the work that I do. And it’s this idea that there is a lot of focus on promoting child mental health and child mental well-being. But often that doesn’t pay very much attention to the mental health challenges that parents might be managing. And we know that mental health challenges, like other physical health challenges, tend to be more common in one family than another family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, when we talk about the intergenerational transmission of mental health challenges, what I’m really often looking at is understanding that there’s genetic factors at play. That’s not the focus of my work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My work is more focused on understanding what are the environmental factors at play and how do we provide support to parents so that they can help their children understand the mental health challenges that may come up and sort of thrive in spite of them or alongside them, or know how to seek care and support to have them addressed in a shorter way and with lower acuity than they might otherwise have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, some of that means providing support for parents on understanding how to manage their own big emotions or reactions when you’re really frustrated with your kid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How do you take a few steps back and manage your own big reactions, which are really reasonable. Kids are really, really challenging. They do lots of things that promote anger, frustration and sadness. But managing those as a parent helps you move forwards into relationship with your child with a little bit more intention. Not in quite that hottest state. And also sort of empowering parents and helping care providers for children know about the importance of addressing mental health challenges through mental health services, through things like co-parent and family support. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the biggest buffers and protective factors for maternal mental health is having a supportive and involved partner. So really think about increasing the awareness of the factors that promote mental health for the whole family. Because we know that kids thrive when parents thrive. And providing that support for everybody is really, really critical for providing long term mental health and mental wellness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also think it’s really important when I think about intergenerational mental health is parenthood and new parenthood is such a hopeful time. Parents are so typically excited to be a parent. They’re so much to look forward to. There’s lots of ups and downs that can come in that process; anxiety, depression, anger, frustration. But overall, there’s this real theme of hope. And then parenting happens and it’s really hard. So, trying to navigate building on that hope is sort of a catalyst for change in terms of caring for oneself, caring for one’s family, and taking the steps so that you can be the parent that you want to be. You can have that relationship with your child that you hoped for, knowing that they’re their own person, too, and they’re going to have their own personality, idiosyncrasies and everything else. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The intergenerational transmission of mental health problems is something that is really foundational to a lot of the work that I do. And it’s this idea that there is a lot of focus on promoting child mental health and child mental well-being. But often that doesn’t pay very much attention to the mental health challenges […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1051","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1052,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1051\/revisions\/1052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}