Jessica Hawks, a child and adolescent psychologist and clinic director at Colorado Children’s Hospital, will make a presentation for Roaring Fork Valley parents about children’s mental health.
Child mental health experts will answer parent questions and offer tools to help improve children’s well being at a presentation at Aspen Country Day School on Sept. 24.
As families adjust to the new school year, Jessica Hawks, a child and adolescent psychologist and clinic director for pediatric mental health at Children’s Hospital Colorado, and Katie Denman, vice president of strategy for pediatric mental health, will answer questions about maintaining children’s well-being and how to address mental health crises. The event is scheduled for 5:30-7 p.m.
“We’ll be talking very broadly about the current mental health landscape for youth in our state, and about some of the typical patterns regarding mental health that we see for youth, beginning at the start of the school year and what sorts of factors tend to contribute to that,” Hawks said.
The 2023 statewide Healthy Kids Colorado Survey that asks students broad questions about their well-being showed improvements in student mental health in Aspen. In 2023, 20% of students at Aspen middle and high school reported feeling sad or hopeless every day for two weeks or more in a row, compared to 40% in 2021.
While students statewide showed improvements in reported mental health in the 2023 survey, Hawks said students are still struggling and she hopes to give parents a toolbox to help their children.
“To me, some of the most important takeaways from that survey were things such as, one in four Colorado students is reporting that they continue to experience persistent thoughts of sadness and hopelessness for more than two weeks in a row, which suggests that they might be experiencing a major depressive episode,” Hawks said. “I think, most alarmingly still, 5.5% of students that completed that survey had reported that in the last 12 months, they had attempted suicide one or more times.
“If suicide continues to be a leading cause of death for the kids in the state of Colorado and across the country, that’s just unacceptable, and we need to continue to do all that we can to help protect kids and change those kinds of outcomes,” she added.
Students tend to start experiencing stressors that can lead to mental health concerns as soon as the school year starts, Hawks said. It’s important for parents to intervene as early as they can, and she will encourage parents to have ongoing conversations with their children to promote resiliency during stressful times of the school year.
Hawks plans to speak to the high pressure that students in Aspen experience, and how parents can alleviate that pressure.
“This isn’t unique to Aspen, but I think Aspen may experience it even more significantly, just related to that really significant high pressure to just be high-achieving, engaged in tremendous amounts of extracurricular activities, on top of school, on top of a lot of these social events that they oftentimes are engaged in,” she said.
“It’s just a lot of pressure and we know that one of the risk factors for youth that can impact their mental health is this really high level of pressure to excel and be the best at everything and schedule and plan every minute of their day in a way that feels very competitive and achievement oriented.”
The presentation is open to anyone in the Roaring Fork Valley, not just Aspen Country Day School. There will be an opportunity for a question-and-answer session for parents.
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