The charity Place2Be has been raising awareness of children’s mental health since 2015 through their annual campaign. This year’s theme (3rd–9th February), “Know Yourself, Grow Yourself”, highlights the importance of children understanding their feelings, how they respond to situations, and their strengths and challenges.
It’s an interesting angle – shining a light on the significance of children getting to know themselves better, recognising and understanding different feelings, how they respond to certain situations and environments and thereby developing an awareness of their strengths, challenges and potential coping strategies.
This broader, more inclusive understanding of mental health goes beyond diagnoses. It encompasses our daily emotional state and our ability to stabilise ourselves when overwhelmed. Mental health is edging closer to being treated on a par with physical health – though there’s still progress to be made.
Part of the evolution of our understanding of mental health is a general acceptance of its scale, not only in terms of the number of different emotional and mental states we all experience, but the way in which we experience them.
Everyone experiences a variety of emotional states, each with its own spectrum of severity. Take anxiety, for example:
How many emotions do you recognize in your class? How many do you see in yourself?
The triggers or causes vary widely, and for each child it will present differently. It needs to be understood, talked about, explored – in all its degrees and manifestations if we’re to help children live with it.
Left unaddressed, anxiety (and similar emotions) can spiral and affect daily life. Helping children recognize their emotions and develop coping strategies is key.
Self-regulation is a life skill, which they need help to hone alongside all the others they are taught at school: how to maintain friendships, behaviours that are acceptable (and not), interplay within a class environment, listening and respecting each other, etc.
Anxiety is just an example and children need guidance in self-regulation to balance emotions, whether positive (like excitement and joy) or negative (like anger and sadness).
In the past there was an unwillingness to talk about mental health, perhaps because of a lack of understanding, or language, or belief that nothing could be done to help.
Thankfully, things are changing.
Talking about emotions is now seen as preferable to bottling them up. There is an acceptance that there is nothing wrong with any of our feelings - they are a natural part of who we are – not something to be ashamed of.
We do, however, need to find ways to manage them, to avoid the risk of them overwhelming us. Opening up about emotions can help:
Feelings are part of who we are, but not all of who we are.
They are part of who we are, not all of who we are. What’s interesting about sharing is, more often than not, we recognise ourselves in each other. That’s helpful from an empathetic perspective, but it also helps us identify and rationalise our own experiences.
As this year’s Children’s Mental Health Week approaches, consider starting with yourself.
Opening up with your class about what’s made you feel anxious, or a bit sad, or cross – and how you dealt with those powerful feelings might shine a light on something somebody else has felt.
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