Ten things I wish you knew about your child’s mental health

With special guest:

• Dr Billy Garvey
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

Our guest today is Dr Billy Garvey who is an expert in a field where you do not get provided with a guide book. All parents know the feeling when following the birth of your child you are set free expecting to know how to raise this very complex small version of ourselves.

One of the first things Dr Billy tells us that it is quite normal not to immediately develop the bonding and attachment that we sometimes hear about. Using his own example with his two children we hear that it took some time for this to develop.

Ten things I wish you knew about your child’s mental health is there to help all of us who encounter difficulties with children of any age. This extends from having a baby that cries at night too much, right through to sullen teenagers. That includes most of us. Whatever the problem is it is most likely that it has been seen before in Dr Billy’s 20 years of practice and the advantage here is that you do not have to go into a long waiting line, sometimes years long, to get advice from the doctor.

In the course of speaking with our guest we get some surprises including the high rate of suicide among children, and the high rate of post-natal depression among parents. We discuss the importance of language when children erupt and when is the best time to intervene if the child loses it regularly. We deal with some old familiar topics such as should children be allowed to cry at night in what is called controlled crying and should parents or anyone else have the right to physically discipline children. What about the modern practice of putting children into long daycare when they are under 6 months of age? Dr Billy deals with this question by referring to the research and using the example of his own children.

There are some very encouraging observations in today’s show. Dr Billy tells us children are not born bad. There is always a cause and the challenge is to find that cause and deal with it. In doing that we need to separate what the child does and who the child is. The conduct may be bad but this should not be extended to saying the child himself is bad.

To reduce pressure on the child we should support effort and growth rather than the simple driver of success. Much of this comes down to the style of parenting we adopt, and in the book there are sections advising the best strategy for parents to adopt. What we want to adopt is an authoritative approach, not authoritarian, not permissive.

The best news? Children usually grow out of the tantrum stage at the age of 4 when they look outside of themselves.

In the show today we get to learn a lot about a very important topic and Dr Billy is a lot of fun.

Dr Billy Garvey

Dr Billy Garvey is a developmental paediatrician with over 20 years’ experience working with children in a number of settings. He is a senior specialist at one of the largest tertiary paediatric hospitals in the world where he sees families, trains clinicians and other professionals working with children and conducts research in child development and mental health.

Dr Billy’s clinical and research interests include child development and mental health, multidisciplinary collaboration, improving health literacy and promoting community engagement to support all families. He holds clinical, advocacy and research roles in government and not-for-profit organisations at a national, state and local level. He is currently undertaking a PhD piloting a model to support child emotional and behavioural development in primary schools and is a Churchill Fellow exploring how social media can be used to support parenting. He is also the founder of Guiding Growing Minds, a social enterprise that aims to give all children the opportunity to reach their potential and live rich and meaningful lives. The Pop Culture Parenting podcast is part of this vision.

Song selection by our guest: Shine by Years and Years

Podcast (mp3)