Understanding Our Children To Understand Our Future

In the Depths of Child Psychology At NIMHANS

Physical and Mental Health have come to the foreground of communication since the pandemic. We need more and more talk around it and thankfully, we are having significant initiatives taken up for the same.

The exhibition at NIMHANS Convention Centre was one such occasion whereby there was a plethora of stalls laid out to explain various elements involving health and technology. 

These stalls included genealogy, nanotechnology, virology, biostatistics, genetic mapping and child psychology.

The exhibition was spread across three storeys and many of us were spread across the stalls. 

I engaged with the booths on the first floor however, the second floor had a natural hold on my attention. 

Somehow, I was drawn to the stall talking about Child Psychology and another one informing about genetic mapping.

By using genetic mapping, it is possible to establish precisely which gene is present on each chromosome and where it is located within that specific chromosome. 

Based on the distance between two genes, mapping can also be used to determine which gene is most likely to recombine. 

Thereby, some PhD scholars were researching DNA samples for over 7 years to establish a pattern and form a connection between genes and mental disorders.

Sugandha, one of the researchers told us, “One can develop certain severe mental disorders as early as being a first-trimester fetus. 

And these are not simple disorders, usually, the cases develop into schizophrenia or narcolepsy.”

Upon hearing about the stages at which one can develop such disorders, it made me think how important it is to understand the children around us and help them in building positive cognition. 

Further, the volunteers at the child psychology stall had arranged three games to understand child and adolescent cognition – Monopoly, Emotion wheel and Changing cognition game.

Monopoly was played with adolescents to check what are the assets that are closest to them thereby revealing the materialistic and nonmaterialistic deprivations they have faced as children. 

The Emotion wheel in contrast works with toddlers, whereby the way in which the toddler pushes the wheel, reveals the mood this toddler would be experiencing.

Both the games were focused on revealing emotions or feelings these children weren’t verbally able to express.

The last game was about changing the responses that children have in case of bullying, in all three cases when they are victims, bullies or bystanders.  

A volunteer would ask the children to choose the ideal response in all three and in case they choose an unfit response.

If so, the volunteer would help them change it, signifying brain cognition can be easily changed if we try it from an early stage.         

With AI and machine learning entering the health sector, it is going to be a different world for our children.

 

However, if we take steps to be attentive to their mental health needs, there is a chance that they will adapt to these changes better.