Promoting mental health
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Note: Module 6 will cover general strategies on mental health promotion.
Interventions to promote the well-being of immigrant and refugee children should reduce the risk factors negatively affecting their mental health. These risk factors include structural discrimination and social exclusion or bullying, as well as social and contextual risk factors like poverty and limited literacy.
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Health promotion
Health promotion interventions are enhanced when they focus on multiple settings that influence children's well-being, including the home and the community.
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School
Schools, as part of the community, are key settings for intervention with children and youth. Interventions should also strengthen protective factors that are known to enhance children's mental health, including the facilitation of supportive environments, high-quality preschool education, safe play areas and meaningful extracurricular activities.
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Family
As family stressors have been shown to affect newcomer children's mental health, promoting the psychosocial well-being of children should include providing support for their families (Khanlou & Crawford, 2006). This may involve helping parents meet their children's emotional and developmental needs, as well as helping parents recognize their own needs. Parents, foster parents or other caregivers of children who have mental health problems and illnesses may require referral to specialized services.
Interventions can include:
By addressing resilience-challenging factors and applying resilience-promoting factors (i.e., protective or preventive factors), service providers can help mediate the challenges that immigrant and refugee children and youth face. At the same time, this population can build on their own strengths and resilience to ease the acculturation process (Khanlou & Wray, 2014).
With supportive families and communities, refugee children and other newcomer children affected by war or trauma will be supported in their healing and in becoming competent young adults.