Topic 1 Importance of parents’ role
A child’s upbringing is vitally important for their psychological wellbeing, and parents have a pivotal role and immense responsibility in fostering their children’s mental health. According to many studies, the approach to mental health issues that parents take, severely affects their children’s wellbeing, as well as their overall stance towards mental health. The extent to which a parent nurtures and loves their child, can have a significant effect in the social and emotional skills that the child develops. As Sperling and Martin (1982, 126) note “[…] the parent who stifles all emotional expression may well develop a repressed child whose emotions will be diverted into some unwholesome substitute for normal emotional expression.” Therefore, suppressive, and repressive parents severely affect their children’s mental health.
On the other hand, the same book notes that “the parent who permits a child to get whatever he/she wants by threatening or actually throwing a temper tantrum probably will develop a child with little or no emotional control, and with little or no respect for parental authority” (ibid.). The conclusion that derives from this passage is that the absence of boundaries can result in emotional immaturity and disobedience. Failing to address issues of mental health throughout a child’s upbringing and neglecting to promote a child’s wellbeing can result in the child having to deal with anxiety later in their life. Anxiety represents one of the “commonest neurotic symptoms” and can be characterised as “a state of continuous fear” (id., 219). Anxiety should not be confused with ‘normal fear’ as it mainly refers to “neurotic fear”. Anxiety is “a symptom of repressed emotional excitement” (id., 22). The family can play a critical role in the possibility of a child developing anxiety in their life.
The most successful approach a parent can adopt is to let their upset child “give some vent to his emotional upheaval” and then help them “see that temper alone will not get him what he wants” (id., 126). Enabling a child to feel secure and loved will have vital psychological benefits for their wellbeing. According to the same source, two of the most important gifts a parent can give to their children is “self-confidence” and “security” (id., 127).
The approach that parents adopt when it comes to their child’s upbringing, can be described as a “parenting style”, and as it was mentioned above, parents may adopt different parenting styles when raising their children.
