Yang Li, lecturer at the School of Politics and Public Administration, Southwest University of Political Science and Law
By means of public health and by giving ordinary parents parental education and training, it is of some significance to address issues of adolescent mental health.
“One center”, a “two-level mechanism” and “three parties’ involvement” can be adopted.“One center”-- centering around schools, a caring platform for mental health of adolescents is to be established. The first is to improve the psychological service platform of the education system, with teachers playing a leading role in it. A working platform will be established with full-time mental health teachers as the core, class teachers and part-time teachers as a cadre, and all the teaching staff taking part in it. Psychological health courses will be set up at school to provide students with psychological intervention and parents with parental education & training while paying close and full attention to students’ physical and mental health.The second is to have in place a network of monitoring mental health of adolescents with students playing a major role. Students who get along with each other every day can be the first to discover any trouble in terms of adolescent mental health. They are encouraged to timely report their peers' psychological or behavioral problems to teachers and parents, so that those in need of help can get care as soon as possible.
"Two-level mechanism" is to improve the adolescent mental health service network. On the one hand, a parental education and training system will be established for all parents to prevent adolescent mental health problems. The school psychological service platform provides regular training in parenting skills for all parents to avoid adolescent psychological and behavioral problems. On the other hand, the system of intervention skills training for parents of adolescents who have problems will be improved, in order to effectively solve their psychological problems. Teachers who have been trained will provide parents of adolescents having psychological problems with parenting training in the form of programs and give them feedback and advice at any time, in order to improve parents' positive parenting skills.
"Three parties’ involvement" is to reinforce the foundation for addressing adolescent mental health issues. We will rely on the education system and get three parties involved including families, schools and society to deal with adolescent mental health issues. Among them, families are the dominant party, and parents should provide children with positive education in order to maintain children's positive and healthy mentality. In addition, parents should pay attention to their children's emotional and psychological changes in a timely manner, participate in parental education and training organized by schools and learn positive parenting and scientific parenting. Schools will play a role of providing assistance. Through observation of students' behaviors at school, teachers will timely communicate with parents about students' psychological and behavioral problems, care for and guide children who have psychological problems, teach parents appropriate family education skills and assist parents to intervene early. Society is a professional party. For some difficult psychological and behavioral problems, the school psychological service platform can be linked to professional psychological counseling, family therapy, social work and other forces to provide students and parents with systematic and professional psychological intervention services.At the same time, social forces can also be incorporated into regular parental education, so that professionals can popularize positive parenting skills to parents and improve their parenting skills.
Published on March 9th, 2023