Suicide - The Second Leading Cause of Death for Children & Teens

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology, suicide is the second major cause of death for children and teens. My blog this week is on this subject because I would like to educate more and more adults about this dangerous issue and help protect our children from the belief that suicide is a viable way to end their problems.

According to the Academy, young children who commit suicide typically do so impulsively because of negative emotions. For adolescents, suicide is usually associated with depression and other factors such as bullying and exposure to violence.

Warning signs may start with a child saying such things as “I wish I was dead.” The Academy urges us to be vigilant about all warning signs, including the following: changes in eating or sleeping habits; frequent or pervasive sadness; withdrawal from friends, family, and regular activities; frequent complaints about physical symptoms often related to emotions, such as stomachaches, headaches, and fatigue; decline in the quality of schoolwork; and preoccupation with death and dying.

In an excellent online article When One Teen’s Suicide Turns Into a Cluster at the website www.thefamilycoach.com, Dr. Catherine Pearlman stresses the fact that too little is being done to effectively combat suicides. For example, just having suicide awareness programs in schools is not enough. She suggests some critical changes that individuals as well as a community as a whole should make to fully address the issues surrounding suicide. These include:

1. Parents and schools must stop putting so much pressure on children to succeed at all costs.

2. Schools need to stop sending grades to parents on a daily basis.

3. Children should be taught that “perfect” is a fallacy and even the idea of striving to be at close to perfection should not be the goal.

4. Schools need crisis intervention plans as well as prophylactic plans for addressing suicide.

5. Parents need to assume that their children are exposed to many risky things, such as drugs, alcohol, vaping, sex, porn, violence, social isolation, bullying and much more. “Talk to your kids even if they don’t talk back. Talk in the car, over dinner or at night with the lights out before bed. Text these conversations if that’s the only way. Have the conversations before you think you have to. Your kids are going through so much more than you think. Get in there and help them.”

6. Love your children no matter what.

No longer should we downplay our children’s suicidal tendencies. Vigilance is key.

To learn more, please go to the following links:

Help Your Children Build Their Social Skills

It’s summer and your children should be out meeting new people and working on their social skills. What can parents do to encourage their children to become more social? Telling them “Go out and make friends” just doesn’t do it.

I recently came across an article entitled Social Skills Activities for Children and Teens: Evidence-based Games and Exercises by Gwen Dewar Ph. D. at the website below which contains 17 social activities for children that all derive from research. Dr. Dewar states that “to develop and grow, kids need first-hand experience with turn-taking, self-regulation, teamwork, and perspective-taking.” She presents many wonderful ideas for activities for your children, from toddlers to teenagers. What I like so much about this article is the amount of research that she references to support the suggested activities.

One of the interesting activities is to help children learn how to read facial expressions better. People who read expressions well have been found to be more helpful towards others. Dr. Dewar provides a separate link to another online article on facial expressions and that article delves more deeply into why having children learn to read facial expressions is important in developing their social skills. There is quite a bit to learn!

Another interesting activity (remember that there are 17 in all!) is to have children read a story with emotional content and then ask the children to talk about it. Dr. Dewar concludes as follows based on the research: “When kids participate in group conversations about emotion, they reflect on their own experiences, and learn about individual differences in the way people react to the world. And that understanding helps kids develop their ‘mind-reading’ abilities.” At the same time, children learn about their emotions and the emotions of others.

I suggest that you read the entire article and then select an activity to do as your and your children’s schedules permit. There is a lot that they can learn and have a fun time as well.

For more information, please CLICK HERE.