Know Yourself: Be empathetic and supportive with your child

Q: My son is suffering from depression, whole family is in pain due to his suffering; we have provided everything to him, and we have forced him to take the engineering course instead of arts to have a better future. Is it wrong to guide and suggest taking the course beneficial to his future? Please give us a way how to come out of this pain.

Ans: I appreciate that you could understand he is depressed, as per Prof. Hall teenage is a stressful and stormy age, and we need to be very empathetic and supportive. Instead, we Indians behave coercively, dominating and pressuring to give guidance and a better future. This will disturb the teenagers who are submissive, who can’t assert their choices and interests to their parents; because of this, it creates a lot of pressure and conflict within them; this conflict will disturb their sleep, appetite, motivation to do anything, they can’t say or share this to their parents, this long-term internal struggle may lead to depression. Parents can’t fathom the abyss of woes they mull over.

Life is defined as the choices that we make. As the option taken by others for us will always create stress and pressure, so better allow the kids to bring their own decisions; if the choice goes wrong, you still have the option to come back and make a new choice. In the name of a better financially successful model followed by others, we copy it and apply it on our children, without knowing their inner world and aspirations, to guide them to a better future. Parents always project their insecurities on their children; this will confuse the kids; the world that children visualised is entirely different from what their parents are anticipating; here, your children are stuck up and don’t know how to come out of it.

All parents must understand, let the children be the hero of their life stories, and let them take the decisions and be successful in executing them, it is ok to not be successful in getting results, but let them be successful of executing their plan, the lesson what they learn from their experiences will be having much more significant value than the loss incurred due to poor result.

Help them make the better choice out of your children’s options, but it is not helpful to enforce your choice as their choice; that definitely pushes them into a lot of stress and then may lead to depression. What choice do you have now? Accept the mistakes that you have done to him, confess to him ask for an apology; this will help him to recover from depression to a larger extent than the remaining process is helping with acceptance, unconditional love and support in the medium of freedom can make him healthy despite this initiative, still in depression, take our help all the best.