As if parenting wasn’t challenging enough, the coronavirus pandemic has raised 1,000 new, unprecedented questions about everything from work, to school, to finances and health.
We asked the experts: How can I keep tabs on my child’s mental health?
"What you can really look for is changes in your child because everybody is different. So look for changes, look for your child not being able to do things they used to be able to do, or look for your child changing in terms of their personality," said clinical psychologist Carolyn Ievers-Landis of Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland.
"For little kids, you know, like 0-3 [years], you'll tend to see just worse behavior than they would normally have kind of everything exaggerated. If they're verbal, they may talk over and over and over again about things that scare them. And a lot of parents have a tendency to be like, 'Oh, let's not talk about it again.' But that can actually be a mistake, because it's better to let them talk it through and work it through," said Virginia pediatrician Dr. Roxanne Allegretti.
“It's best to work in conjunction with your pediatrician or your family medicine doctor to figure out if this is just a normal teenage mood swing, or is this something a little bit more related to maybe a mental health issue that's been brewing,” stated pediatrician Dr. Dontal Johnson of Meharry Medical College in Nashville.
