Parents can play significant roles in helping to raise a children’s self-esteem as this helps to bolster the self worth and resilience of children. Self–esteem determines how we value ourselves, affects our trust in people, in our abilities, and affects relationships. Due to constituency in parenting skills, parents are usually in a better position to easily identify and curtail early symptoms of self harm in children. Parents can quickly seek professional help from medical experts as a means of parents support in helping such a child stop the use of ineffective or damaging coping behaviours, which according to health experts, often mask possible feelings of vulnerability, emotional distress, low self-esteem, childhood neglect as well as hopelessness.
Through some effective first hand parents coaching, parents can as well help prevent the chances of a child subscribing to self injury as a last resort by offering simple, clear guidelines for effectively bolstering self-esteem and confidence. The issue of mental health isn’t just limited to particular groups; they also span all classes; race and cultures and self harm is no different. This condition is not just expressed in terms of the individual cutting, inflicting self-harm, or self-injury, but it includes a wide range of things people deliberately do to themselves that are harmful but usually not fatal. Problems with self esteem could also be the result of childhood neglect or of emotional distress resulting from negligence or intentional acts of another person.
From available statistics, one in twelve young persons are said to subscribe to or adopt self-harm whilst in the last ten years in-patient admissions resulting from self injury have increased by an alarming 68%. According to health experts, parenting programs should be another long term strategy to be adopted if the prevalent cases of self injury among children and young people are to be reduced to its barest minimum. It is an erroneous calculation when self-harm is dismissed as just an attention seeking behavioural pattern but it is a probable sign that young people are feeling terrible internal pain and are not coping well with it. On the other hand, some good parenting course guides parents on how to help foster empathy, honesty, self-reliance, self-control, kindness, cooperation, and cheerfulness in children and young people. While it teaches parents on promoting a child’s motivational standards and desire to achieve, it also guides them on how best to protect children from developing eating disorders, anti-social behaviour, anxiety, depression, alcohol and drug abuse problems.
With lots of resources available to help enlighten and improve on parenting tips, parents are also advised to make good use of peer support in solving these anomalies as this invariably helps to gradually reduce the rate at which children self harm. A few parenting tips are as follows:
- What you do matters
- You cannot be way too loving
- Be involved in your child’s life
- Adapt your parenting to fit your child
- Establish and set rules
- Foster you child’s independence
- Be consistent, etc…
In all of this, whatever sets of support and skill parents apply when raising children will help shape them in adulthood. So if as a parent you don’t master the art of being able to manage your child’s behaviour when he/she is young, they will invariably have a hard time learning how to manage themself when you aren’t around. The World Health Organization reveals that the following strategies are important in helping to greatly reduce the possibilities of future self harming occurrences in children and young:
- Making sure children have a strong sense of identity.
- Promoting both the stability and continuity of children’s’ education.
- Promoting healthy diet and good eating habits.
- Promoting emotional expression.
- Providing information about services and accessing specialist support early on.
- Self harm training and raising awareness where possible.
In identifying preventive measures, it is clear that extra- curricular activities can help to reduce and help prevent self-harm as well as attempts at suicide in children. However, quite a number of young people would prefer to turn to their peers for support whilst many have said that all they simply want is to be able to talk to someone who will listen attentively to and respect them about problems and issues in their daily lives.
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