Understanding Children’s Mental Health

The theme for this year’s Children’s Mental Health Week (organised by the charity Place2Be) is ‘This is My Place’, focussing on our sense of belonging. The annual campaign to raise awareness of children’s mental health is a great opportunity to support children to think and talk about how and what they’re feeling. As well as offering support and strategies, it develops empathy, commonality, understanding and compassion.

The world can be an overwhelming, foreign, frightening place, in which we can feel detached and isolated, withdrawn and polarised (both despite and because of the busy-ness around us). There’s an interesting exploration of this in Xin Li’s I Lived Inside a Whale where a girl who’s struggling to find somewhere she can feel at home, builds a dark, comfortable, retreat inside a “whale” in her bedroom.

The perceived risk of this retreat is exclusion – is it too easy to let those who struggle to fit in be removed or segregated from our communities, making inclusion and acceptance harder to reach? For Xin Li’s girl though, it’s not about excluding others – she’s able to share her special place, as long as they understand and respect the values that define it.

When we talk about belonging, perhaps we need to start with an understanding that what makes us feel comfortable and secure is individual. We have to come to that premise with an open mind, willing to accept that a person’s sense of belonging may be amongst like-minded people in a crowded room, with one special person who makes us feel seen, or alone with our own thoughts inside a den.

It might be loud and full, or quiet and peaceful; it might be in the wild wilderness or the heart of a bustling city. Whatever it takes to give us that sense of security, the likelihood is that not having it – feeling uncomfortable and scared – is the same for everyone: sad, disorientating and isolating.

Indeed, it is these feelings that we need to talk about frequently and regularly, because they so often spiral into bigger, more debilitating states of mind. Understanding how not fitting in can feel, how it can differ from person to person, how hard it can make life is where we need to start, if we’re to find and offer solutions and support.

When Xin Li’s girl lets others into her world – it expands, and accommodates them, they can all belong inside her whale. The same can be true within a classroom – if children can share what makes them feel scared or isolated, as well as what makes them feel safe and secure, a space can be built that meets those needs, where everyone is seen and heard, and everyone belongs.

Belonging relies on overarching values of acceptance and tolerance. We need to help children to see beyond their own worlds and their own emotional boundaries, in order to fully understand and see others’. School is the first – essential – building block in the creation of safe, kind, empathetic communities.

Everyone has a right to feeling a sense of belonging, wherever they are and whoever they’re with, it starts with an openness to what that looks like, and us all being willing to climb inside the whale.