One Step To Parenting: How We Can Minimise The Increasing Youths' Suicide Rate?

Faith, power, magic, and spirituality are all connected; they are like the pillars of a building. Everything else is a lie or a falsehood if you believe it to be true.

Here is an interesting study published in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Psychiatry journal. This was a long-term study that included several observations on the same subjects over time, sometimes for many years. In this case, there were two groups of children ages 6–18. They came from different types of families.

Here, the similarities and differences between children from 66 religious and spiritual families and those from 66 non-religious and non-spiritual families are examined, examining their emotional, mental, and physical health over a long period, in which the rate of suicide was 80 times higher among children of non-religious families compared to religious families. And according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), suicide is the second-leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10-14 and 25-34. Apart from this, we can see that overall youth crime rates are increasing day by day. Our society is going through worthlessness, unscrupulousness, mental unhealthiness, alcoholism, drug addiction, pessimism, and many more.

Increasing Youths' Suicide Rate

Why do our youth give up their lives? Why are they so vulnerable emotionally? Should we be held responsible? Should we miss something major in our breeding? Why is our generation feeling hopelessness, helplessness, panic, and frustration in certain situations?

If we need to resolve all these things, then we should start working on our children's nurturing system. As L. R. Knost perfectly quoted, "It is not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. "It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless."

We need to think more about his/her area of emotion. What do you do when your child shows aggression, tears, or any other emotion in any situation? Did you allow them to express themselves? Did you try to find the reason behind the behaviour? Did you have time to understand their feelings? Did you ask them, "What happened, baby? "Tell me all about it, I am here to hear you!" Did you try to teach them how to cope with all those bad-sad feelings? Or do you just yell at them and try to silence them, hitting them so casually at times? Throughout our parenting, this pattern of behaviour should result in repression and the storage of his/her emotional memory. Most of the time, people are disconnected from their emotions and the effects they have on their lives.

When we talk about spirituality, it’s not a matter of being a believer or an atheist but of instilling a certain style or routine in our children during their upbringing. When every member of the family prays to an invisible power, the children develop the feeling that someone is always with them, and this feeling or attitude persists even when they face difficult situations in their lives, sometimes giving them the ability to fight the situation. When you tell them a story, you are tapping into their power of imagination as well as their plethora of vocabulary, and being an empathetic listener to them makes it easier to behave the same way as everyone else. When you respect their emotions instead of your work, it gives them hope to become more sensible, emotional, and valuable human beings rather than just highly intellectual, practical, and hard-hearted people.

Are we teaching our future generation all these aspects? Are they aware of human abilities? Are we succeeding in instilling in their faith, wonder, patience, trust, sympathy, honesty, compassion, humility, kindness, and forgiveness? Will our generation go astray or collapse? Now is the time to think critically about our society and make greater efforts to improve the child-rearing system. Now it is time that we must build/create more valuable, ethically profound, and sensible creatures for Earth.

You can't create a good society, but you are able to create a good human being.

Views expressed are the author's own.

Hiral Brahmkshatriya is a PhD in Psychology. She is an Administrative Assitant At Coast Tire & Auto Service. 

Suggested Reading: Authors Suma Varughese, Harvinder Kaur Elucidate On Spirituality, Code To Happiness