Emotional well-being
For development of good mental health, children need:
- Love, praise, and positive regard from trusted family members and other adults. Children thrive on affection and loving attention, praise and encouragement.
- To have boundaries set on their behaviour and to be monitored and supervised when at play or at leisure.
- Acceptance for who they are at home, school, and in the community. Love and positive regard should not be conditional on their parents’, teachers’ or sports coaches’ wants and needs. Children have a range of skills and they need to be challenged in order to grow but they don’t need to be criticized because they aren’t consistently good at everything they try.
- Encouragement and support to succeed at school and to develop their skills and talents. Children should be given the opportunity to explore the arts, be exposed to a wide variety of educational and cultural activities, and learn manual skills, so that they can find their gifts. It is the environment that must change in order to accommodate the range of skills, abilities, difficulties and impairments that children demonstrate all through their development.
- A safe neighbourhood in which to live and play. Neighbourhoods have a lot of influence on whether or not children thrive. In neighbourhoods where populations are transient, where there is high unemployment, high numbers of poor families led by single mothers, language and social skills are poor and academic achievement is low, there are more school dropouts and more crime.
- Loving guidance and discipline. Children who are given boundaries, who are treated fairly, and given good guidance about their behaviour, generally develop good self regard and are more likely to be respectful of others. On the other hand, children who are treated harshly and frequently criticized tend to develop behaviour, mood or relationship problems that can persist into adult life.[1,2]
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