Children and Teenagers
Growing up … we all try to make sense of the world around us as we journey through life, and when our minds are young, our experience limited, we often drift into stress, anxiety, confusion and other negative debilitating behaviour.
Young children and teenagers have so many conflicting signals to interpret and understand; parent boundaries, school, teachers, peers, and messages from the media; images presented about what is good, bad, even success, and failure. These messages, flooding the young mind, do not come with clear instructions of what they mean or how they affect one’s life … they come in a random lump of living.
With small children, the world evolves around them, until they gain enough experience to expand their understanding, and develop consequential thinking skills. If there are problems in the family, then often children take these on as their own, and see themselves as part of the problem, often becoming fearful, guilty and stressed. Issues at school or with friends can have the same impact, which often leads to conflict, misunderstandings, resulting in health issues, and unacceptable behaviour.
When children experience stress or anxiety it often appears in different forms, some of these are;
- School work begins to slide
- Start to lose things
- Start to steal
- Become accident prone
- Have headaches and tummy upsets
- Bite their nails
- Pull hair or develop physical habits like scratching, rubbing hands
- May start to wet the bed after being dry for some time
- Health problems may start developing
- Other people may notice a dramatic change in behaviour or disposition
- A child may stop wanting to go to school
- They may begin causing problems in the classroom
- Start telling lies or other avoidance patterns
- A child may turn to drugs or alcohol
- Have trouble sleeping
- Have frequent nightmares or sleep walk
A child’s mind is more susceptible to external signals (what they hear, see, smell, taste, and touch) than adult minds, because the young mind is developing and they often have little or no ability to contrast situations to make judgements. Every situation is new and therefore prone to error.
At Mind For Life we have a unique programme that has helped many children and teenagers who were suffering from anxiety or stress, to change their lives permanently. The corner-stone of the programme is the Dynamic Thought Transfer Technique TM and our methods of teaching. We do not have any magic formulas or special powers, we do not tell people how to live their lives … what we do is guide, teach, support, and encourage; if the child fully participates in the programme then they will change their restrictive behaviour.