Children's Mental Health Week
3rd-9th February 2025
Children’s Mental Health Week is an annual campaign spearheaded by the children’s mental health charity Place 2 Be, to help shine a spotlight onto the importance of children’s and young people’s emotional well-being. The theme this year is ‘Know Yourself, Grow Yourself’. This article picks up this theme, the first part is written directly for children and the second part for the adults in their lives.
​
Know Yourself, Grow Yourself: For children & young people
In the same way that we take care of our bodies, it is super important to take care of our minds. One of the best ways to feel happy and confident is by knowing yourself.
​
This means understanding who you are, what makes you feel good, what makes you feel upset and how to deal with the different feelings you have. When you know yourself well, you can spot when things feel okay and when you might need some extra help.
​
Knowing yourself is an important part of being able to grow yourself. Being able to handle tricky feelings like stress, worry, anger and sadness are all part of normal learning and personal development. The more you know about how your mind works, what kind of thoughts and feelings you have, the more aware you can be of what helps you to keep in a positive mind-space.
​
3 ways to try putting this into practise are: mindfulness, journalling and body-mind connection:
​
Paying attention to how you feel at different moments of each day is called mindfulness. Ask yourself things like: “What made me smile today?” or “What made me feel upset?” or “When did I feel best today?”. Sharing your thoughts with a trusted person can help too, a friend, a family member, another safe adult.
​
Noting down the great things that happen in a day and the things you haven’t felt so good about is called journalling. This is a useful way for you to stop thoughts bouncing around your mind and help you to process them out instead. You can do this in a notebook or electronically (notes on a phone or in a file on an ipad or laptop)
.
Smiling and laughing are physical actions associated with happiness and they help us to release positive chemicals from our brain that in turn help our bodies to relax, this is an example of the body-mind connection. Smiles and laughter can help us to feel relaxed and boost our mood which then makes us more able to cope when things aren’t going as well as we would like. Your brain can still generate these positive chemicals when you fake laughing or smiling, which can help lift you. So if you’re having a tough day, try to force yourself to grin or chuckle for a couple of minutes and see if you start to feel better …
​
Growing yourself is something you will do your whole life, the human brain doesn’t fully develop until around your mid-20’s so you will naturally know different things about yourself as you get older.
​Keep looking after your mind, as well as your body.
​
Know Yourself, Grow Yourself: For adults supporting children & young people
Adults can play a really important role in helping young people’s emotional wellbeing to thrive. It’s just as important to focus on this as it is on their physical health.
​
Parenting, guiding and mentoring children can be super challenging, and time can be in short supply for busy adults, but this Children’s Mental Health Week, why not carry out a little MOT on whether there are other things you could do to help boost the young people in your life.
​
Honing your awareness of the inner world of your child is about paying attention to changes - mood, energy levels, eating and drinking habits, toilet routines, general behaviour, social contacts, sleep patterns - these all give clues as to how a child is feeling. They don’t always express themselves verbally, so looking for non-verbal signals can be a good starter for ten in understanding your child more and sometimes this means you can spot signs of distress or trouble before they have recognised this fully for themselves.
​
Listening without judgement is a way of encouraging positive and open communication. Giving children a safe space to express or talk about their thoughts or worries can give you the opportunity to help them regulate emotionally. Letting the big emotions run out of steam without losing your own cool can then create that space to effectively talk through what happened and possible solutions that you and/or they could look at implementing.
​
Helping young people to understand that it is normal to experience a whole range of emotions, including the ones that have a more negative association (like anger, anxiety or apathy) is a great way to enable them to build emotional resilience. This can be a great pathway to introduce them to self-help strategies to self-soothe during worried or stressed times, like taking deep breaths, using mindfulness, distracting the brain with counting or using physical exertion to release built-up energy. Open dialogue can also encourage them to embrace talking about not feeling good, doing this from a young age sets them in good stead for feeling able to reach out for support through their teenage and young adulthood years.
It is also really important for you to look after your own mental health. Modelling to young people how to self-regulate, how to manage boundaries, how to navigate complicated and intense emotions are all essential for their social-emotional development. But above all, it’s crucial for you to be able to function as healthily as possible as an adult.
So this Children’s Mental Health Week, notice if there is something additional you can do to support any young people in your life with their emotional wellbeing as well as taking a personal look at where you are on your own emotional and mental health barometer. It’s ok for adults to ask for help and support too.
​
​
