MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN (script)

 MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN 

(script)

Hello everyone,

Thank you for joining us today to talk about a world wide issue that doesn't have enough light on it. Mental health is a massive issue in todays world but what we fail to talk about is children's' mental health. Many of us know someone who has struggles, experienced or know of someone who has had mental health problems. Now i would like you to think of yourself when you were the age of 10-15 years old, i will give you a second to think of who you were at that age and how you acted, what your biggest stressors were at that age...

Im sure many of you thought about the sports you were playing, your youths innocence, middle school friendships you had with nearly no problems in the world as you were young with little responsibilities. 

Now that you can picture yourself at that age, imagine persistently feeling alone, helpless, exhausted and losing interest in all your favorite activities. When a young child has these feeling so so long and they are going unrecognized, they being to lash out since they don't know how tor process these strong feelings and emotions. Im sure everyone listening has experienced these feelings at some point in their lives but its not normal to have them on a daily basis. When it is consistent for so long without getting some type of hekp or having someone to talk to, children tend to fall down a deep path because they dint know that these feelings can be helped, instead they feel alone with these thoughts. 

Though everyone has different life experiences and reacts differently, if you see a friend who's been acting differently or out of their normal self, make sure that they know its okay to talk about what they are feeling, make sure to listen rather than talk, don't force the conversation and let them know that they are not alone as there is many resources out there that can help a child learn how to process and work through these thoughts. 

Sources:

Discussion:

The problem that I identified today was children's mental health. Children ages 10-15 make up 13% of the population that experience mental health problems. Though mental health is a common topic in todays society, children's mental health isn't brought into the light as much, but with social media and a lack of attention children receive when it comes to their thoughts and emotions its becoming a bigger issue than many notice. 

The Social Cognitive Model (SCT) has 2 components that I think are important to look at in within the topic of children's mental health.

Environmental factors- norms and social support:

The norms and social support in children's mental health is why i thought to talk about the issue in the first place. It is not noticed as much because children ages 10-15 are supposed to be in youth sports, learning more about themselves and the world, not having these deep dark thoughts. Being that young and feeling these things, many other kids that age either don't understand or aren't experiencing. When you cant relate to anyone it makes you feel alone causing children to bury their thoughts. 

Personal Factors- knowledge:

The small knowledge children have on their thoughts in general is very smell, bringing mental health into the bigger the knowledge is even less. Children ages 10-15 barley understand life itself at that age, so how can we expect them to understand and process these dark emotions and feelings when as adults we barley understand mental health.

I chose to talk about both these factors as both are two factors that hopefully can help shed light onto the issue children's mental health. By normalizing the mental health and making it a bigger issue for children hopefully there will be more resources and we can start recognizing and seeing the signs sooner to help make a change in the mental health.