How to raise happy, empathetic children when you suffer from a mental health condition

I have lived with bipolar disorder, a serious mental-health condition, for over two decades. I am the mother of two boys, Amartya, 14 and Agastya, 11. Bipolarity, as the name implies, takes me to euphoric highs and despairing lows; mood swings that my boys have witnessed growing up. I have been stable for the last four years, and also had a similar period of equilibrium when the children were very young. But, in between, there were many years punctuated by regular ‘manic episodes’, when I was far too energetic, and lost in my own racing thoughts, or plunged into weeks of depression.

Nonetheless, my children are happy, confident and secure, at home and at school. Our bond is strong. My job – as a writer, motivational speaker and visiting faculty – allows me to work flexibly and largely from home. I was a hands-on mother when they were young, and even now, when their schedules are busier, we spend a lot of time together at the dinner table, playing table tennis, watching movies on the weekends and going on trips. Daily life is pretty ‘normal’, in other words.

Some specific parenting approaches have helped us weather these storms. First, it is important to acknowledge that one can’t hide anything from the children. They refer to my mood swings in their own language, saying “Mamma’s in a funny mood.” Amartya is particularly quick to notice changes in my expressions and behaviour. “Why are your eyes so red? Why are you so silent?” he said, even when he was quite young. Apart from the extreme mood swings that take place from time to time, bipolarity is defined by daily oscillations in moods; up, down and sideways. He is quick to detect these shifts in body posture, expressions, tone of voice and energy levels.

It is important to provide children with an honest explanation of what’s going on. Since I like writing, I wrote them a poem called ‘Tigress in the bedroom’ that explains bipolarity to young children, to talk about what it feels like when your thoughts and emotions take you in different directions. The children said they could relate to it. Even if you don’t want to write a poem, you can always explain the condition and its symptoms in simple language to them.

In emergencies, immediate family support is critical. When my manic episodes are at their peak, my husband Amit dispatches me to my sister’s or to my mother’s home to recover. This shields the children from my excesses — when I am talking to myself, talking into a voice recorder, not sleeping all night, and writing furiously. Although we haven’t had to resort to this tactic for some time, temporary re-location is our standard operating procedure. Amit, my in-laws and our live-in staff provide a comforting cocoon for the boys when I am away.

Once the children understood and absorbed the condition, they developed a sense of empathy and maturity about the subject. On one occasion, Amit pointed out his anxieties about taking care of me if we went to a potentially troublesome destination that I wanted us to travel to on holiday. “If there’s trouble, I don’t know what’s going on in her mind, you don’t know what’s going on in her mind,” he told Amartya, who responded, softly and gently, “She doesn’t know what’s going on in her mind, either.”

Even if a mental-health condition is normalised at home and the children are well-adjusted, parental guilt can hover like a cloud. Bipolarity is understood to be a hereditary illness, and I often wonder about the probabilities of passing it onto them, which to my knowledge, is higher than the average layperson, but not very high in absolute terms. This is somewhat reassuring, and fortifies my resolve to enhance their resilience, so that they are able to face setbacks in life, without being triggered, as far as possible.

Perhaps, the most important lens to look at mental health is through the lens of health: when I am manic, it is only my mind that is unwell, it is not my personality or identity that is under siege. It is important to use words like ‘unwell’, rather than anything more judgmental. Just like COVID, all I need is time to rest and recover. And quite like COVID and its successive waves, my experience of my mood swings is that they come and go, they do not stay. I always come back home, and my children know that.

Aparna Piramal Raje is the author of Chemical Khichdi: How I Hacked My Mental Health (Ebury Press)

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