Whether you’re a parent with a child suffering from low mental health or a guardian with a poor mental health patient entrusted in your care, you sure know that you could get things overboard with excessive care at times.

And it can be frustrating to not get a positive response from the recipient when you’re doing your best to make them feel good.

This often happens because we have not given time to study these children and pay good attention to their language and styles of communicating.

It might surprise you to know that a child who requested to be left alone really craves your attention. While a child who wouldn’t argue about your presence with them wishes you could just give them some space.

In such situations as this, questions are great tools to know the root cause of a problem, what they want or what they don’t want. When used rightly, it could prevent a lot of havoc or more mental health damage.

There are two major types of questions you could ask as a parent or caregiver.

Open-ended questions and Close-ended

Open-ended questions are the type of questions that encourages the child or patient to pause, think reflect and give some meaningful response to the question.

Open-ended questions are thought-provoking and your child will always respond well to them when rightly used.

Here is an example: Tell me what you like best about everything that happened at school today.

Close-ended question on the other hand does not give room for much critical thinking or meaningful response from the child other than a yes or no answer.

Using this type of question too much in a conversation would make the child suspect they are being interrogated and then stop replying totally.

An example is: have you eaten? Have you done your assignment?

Meanwhile, this type of question can be used alongside the open-ended question, especially in situations where the child is quite reluctant to open up.

Here is an example: have you eaten today?

Tell me what you like best about everything that happened today.

This is a great way to get your low mental health child or patient to open up to you without reluctance and tell you all they have bothering them.