Your mental health benefits should cover your employees’ kids, too

The most effective way to tackle employees' mental health is by taking care of their kids.

Employees are carrying a heavy burden of stress both in and out of the office, which can have negative consequences on their family members, particularly their children. In a survey from Headspace, a mental health and wellness platform, 39% of employees say work stress bleeds into their home life and vice-versa, and 84% want their mental health benefits to extend to their dependents.

“The people who come to work every day are whole people — they have families, they have lives and they have all of this messiness that's come out of the pandemic,” says Lindsay Crittendon, senior director of strategy and operations at Headspace. “And stress has a really remarkable way of transferring itself from one person to the next.”

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Behind every stressed out child, says Crittendon, is a stressed out parent. While employees have been dealing with increased rates of stress, anxiety, PTSD and depression since the start of the pandemic, younger generations are faring even worse — 1 in 7 U.S. teens is currently struggling with their mental health, and aren't receiving any kind of treatment or help, according to data from Headspace.

“A lot of times employees don't really make a distinction between their mental health and their kids' mental health,” Crittendon says. “But those things impact them too. So now parents show up [to work] stressed because their family is stressed.”

Among Headspace’s mental health offerings, there’s a platform dedicated specifically to children. The content is geared toward helping children and teens practice healthy sleep, relaxation and stress management habits, and provides tools like podcasts and meditations.

“I don't know a single parent who hasn't had to struggle with getting their kids to sleep at some point in time,” Crittendon says. “So that's the angle that we take on them — because if your kid sleeps, you sleep.”

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Mental health platforms and initiatives — such as Headspace — can be rolled out directly through a company’s HR department in the same way any benefit would alongside EAPs. And should companies choose to broaden their offerings to include more strategic mental health resources for families, it could do more to promote employee retention and boost employee performance than other employee-only wellness strategies, Crittendon says.

The pandemic may have exacerbated the need for more comprehensive mental health plans, but nearing a return to normalcy won’t mean the needs of your employees will go away.

“We don't all yet know how things will iron out,” Crittendon says. “So companies need to offer health benefits to everyone in their family plans. That's a trend that's not going away anytime soon.”