You Might Also Like: Raising Families with Dr. Jerry Weichman

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_4** (1:05)
Welcome to Raising Families, the podcast for proactive parents on the go. No fluff, no empty advice, just practical tools and strategies to strengthen your family's mental health and stability.
Parenting is hard, but it doesn't have to be overwhelming. And it's the most important job you'll ever have.

**Jerry Weichman** (1:30)
Hello and welcome back. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy life to be here with me today. We're coming off a great week. If you didn't catch my solo as well as the interview Christina and I had, please make sure to go back and listen to them because there was a lot of valuable information there for you. We're moving on and this week we're discussing de-stigmatizing mental health issues.
It's been interesting for me to watch over the past 50 years, how much society has moved across the spectrum when it comes to mental health and mental health issues. We've gone from generations of repressors, parents and grandparents who never talked nor tried to work on any mental health issue, whether it be depression, anxiety, or any other issue for that matter. Instead, they stuffed all of their emotions. They simply tried to get tougher than it, and many of them were simply shut down and angry, and they were very emotionally disconnected and not attuned to any of their kids' emotions.
A lot of development and awareness in mental health has occurred over the past few decades. There's so much more acknowledgement of mental health issues. There's more discussions, there's more information. There are more tools to combat mental health issues. Social media has helped with this. That's a positive.
The pendulum on mental health swung, and people thought it swung too far. There are parents that are concerned about social emotional learning in schools, as they fear too much awareness or choice or freedom or influence can lead to the possibility that their kids could develop issues when they weren't there in the first place. There are kids who, whether exposed to their peers or social media or both, who say that they are depressed or that they have anxiety. And some have a faulty belief that when they're experiencing these, that they're stuck with it for life. They don't work on it because they don't believe they can. They don't believe that they can do anything about it. They don't talk about how they're feeling. And they're really in a helpless, hopeless mindset. And some do use it as an excuse as a crutch for things. I didn't get my homework turned in. This is why I'm not motivated. So are our kids really stuck in mental health issues if they develop them? What discussions should we be having with our kids when they struggle? Stay tuned because the answers that you seek are coming right now.
Okay, so there are a decent amount of things to unpack when it comes to our kids' views on mental health, especially when they're having a challenging time. First of all, there still is a stigma when it comes to mental health struggles. Kids and teens will attach shame, judgment, fear to their mental health challenges. They believe that struggling emotionally somehow says something negative about who they are as a person at this stage of development. How they're perceived and received is worth its weight in gold for teens and preteens at this stage.
When kids and teens struggle, many will have critical thoughts that run the show in their mind. I'm weak. People will think I'm crazy.
I should be able to handle this. Good people don't struggle. Successful people or even people that are okay don't have this. As a result, the worst part of this is that the majority of them stay silent. They don't talk to anybody close to them, whether it be parents, siblings, uncles, friends, about the struggles that they're experiencing. And that's a concern.