3rd February, 2025
It’s Children's Mental Health Week and Place2Be’s theme for 2025 is encouraging our young people to, ‘Know Yourself, Grow Yourself!’ Here are our top tips for supporting our children’s mental health.
1. Mindful activities for quality time together. Create opportunities for one-to-one conversation. Take a walk and talk about everyday stuff, this can create an open environment where you ask how certain situations made them feel. Low pressure activities like baking creates a safe space to chat but is also a hobby to get immersed in, taking their mind off any worries they may have.
2. Celebrate their individual strengths. We all love a bit of praise. Build confidence and passion by encouraging talents, this will foster self-esteem while also nurturing what they’re interested in. Keep in mind here, that your children’s mental health might be affected if they think that they need to excel in every task. Reassure them that this is something to be enjoyed, that they’ll grow from learning and trying. Being successful is a process.
3. Encourage emotional awareness. It’s okay to have feelings. Create safe spaces for children to express their emotions and have an open dialog about their reactions to certain situations. Journaling is a great way for them to explore their own emotions. Creative pursuits such as painting and poetry are also a great way for helping children express their emotions in a non-threatening way.
4. Set goals. Setting small, achievable goals can work wonders for a child’s confidence and mental health. For example, improving school grades can seem like a daunting task in itself, help them break that down into manageable chunks to achieve this long-term goal. Many looked after children have never done homework before, starting off with 15 minutes per weekday evening to get them into a routine is a small and quick win for improving their relationship with learning. When they’re more confident, gradually increase the time. Don’t forget to mark milestones to remind them of the progress they’ve made.
5. Listen. This is a tip just for you! Active listening is not always the easiest thing to practice when life is busy. But trying to stay in the moment when a child is talking to you is so important. If they suspect you’re distracted when they’re trying to communicate, or you dismiss something as trivial in haste, then they’ll likely not seek to confide in you again. Children and young people are just starting to figure out the world, take their worries seriously.
Young people’s mental health is a true passion of ours at Capstone Foster Care. Our approach to fostering will always be a therapeutic one, where the onus is on us, the adults, to adapt our approach towards children based on their needs and not our preconceptions.
We do this by offering specialist training to our team as well as our foster carers, such as therapeutic parenting courses, PACE and DDP. Of course, all of this supported by our in-house team of therapists, MATTS.
Together we support children’s mental health.
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