EDUCATION
There are many gaps which can easily affect the education of the girl child if she is not well in the mind. The fact that these children go through a lot and this can be in the homes where they live, the schools where they go, and the community at large which affect their mental wellbeing.
Let us first understand what mental wellbeing is.
This doesn’t mean absence of challenges but rather how well we are copying with the daily life or what feels possible for the moment. A good mental wellbeing doesn’t mean you are always happy or unaffected by your experiences. The fact is adolescents are vulnerable to psycho-social problems because of physical and psychological changes that occur in their bodies during their development stages. This may affect their energy levels of concentration, dependability, mental ability, and optimum hindering performance.
It is very important to understand the kind of a child you are dealing with. For example, the family dynamics; and unparalleled changes in family structures. In other words, the home environment, many children present a place of instability and emotional ups where security, caring and nurturing are non-existent, separation, divorce, death or abandonment removes one or both parents from the family. This leaves the child in question with hopelessness. So, this will automatically affect her ability to study, leading to poor grades.
Lack of attention and care that may accompany such change adversary impacts children’s subsequent emotional and financial difficulties of single parent household further strains the family dynamics. This leads to trauma, thus affecting the child, making it very hard to think critically in her academics.
Domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse, substance abuse and mental illness, some families are at an alarming rate. So, students go to school with dysfunctional family backgrounds that evoke stress and trepidation among students hence affecting their education.
Children of Alcoholics
Alcohol usually produces significant anxiety as students/children grasp with the person’s familiar implications of watching and participating in drinking practices. It is imperative that a counsellor recognizes the existence and impact of family discourse and childhood trauma on the students and provide them with support necessary to enable them cope with their situations. So with the above concerns, this tends to leave the child with unstable mind hence affecting her/his education as explained below;
- I. There is lack of concentration. Here, it becomes very hard for one to grasp the academic concepts leading to poor grades.
- II. Withdrawal from social activities, meaning that the children tend to lose interest in the school activities which affects their grades.
- III. It may lead to depression which is associated with low grade points average.1
- IV. Inability to think critically. The student will not be in position to think and reason out as required of her which affects her education.
- V. Low self-esteem. The student will not believe in herself due to fear within her mind thinking that she is incompetent.
- VI. Loss of hope. Here everything becomes meaningless and the student doesn’t attach any meaning to what she does which affects her grades
- VII. Lack of ambition in life/no goal but just passing through for the sake of it.
- VIII. Stress which comes up as a result of uncoordinated issues in the mind which the child experiences will greatly affect her studies.
- IX. Traumatized mind. A child can never focus due to several episodes. One may be experiencing flashbacks of what happened hence affecting her performance.
- X. Anxiety. This causes a child to be in state of feeling tense, worried, unsettled, insecure, and worrying over issues that may not matter.
1 Dong X, Yang K, Zhang R, Lv Y. The Mental Health and Grade Point Average among College Students from Lower Socioeconomic Status Based on Healthcare Data Analysis. J Healthc Eng. 2021 Nov 30;2021:2378202. doi: 10.1155/2021/2378202. PMID: 34900179; PMCID: PMC8654553
Conclusion
This is the reason for a call for a therapist/counsellor to help out these children or student to live a meaningful life. In this way, a counsellor sets goals of counselling which must be attained at the end of the day as listed below:
To facilitate behavioural change
- To improve the clients/students’ ability to establish and maintain relationships
- To enhance the students/clients’ effectiveness and ability to cope
- To promote decision making
- To facilitate the students/clients potential for growth and development
- To help the clients understand and accept themselves
- CGC has been able to incorporate the above by including psychosocial support to her beneficiaries in order to improve on their grades.
