Children’s mental health week: 3 ways to connect with young people

This children’s mental health awareness week, we asked for a few thoughts from our expert team around the theme of ‘let’s connect’. Below we look at different ways to connect: connecting with nature, connecting face to face within the community, and how gaining new skills and understanding via training can help to improve a connection with a young person

Connecting with nature

The Kids Inspire therapeutic team make the most of the great outdoors during their sessions with service users who are experiencing anxiety, depression or other emerging mental health difficulties.

CEO and Clinical Director Sue Bell OBE, sometimes chooses to take service users outside on the swings as part of their therapy, she describes the sensation ‘as comforting’ for those with developmental trauma.

Vicky, one of our Art Therapists told us that: “Exploring nature helps young people with mental health difficulties to reconnect with themselves. We often use nature to help young people and families to build emotional resilience.”

Vicky went on to say that she appreciates the benefits of being outside and said: “Being out in nature is a great way to reconnect with yourself, your body, and to release anxiety and tension. We can probably all recognise the positive effect on our wellbeing from going on a short walk or simply sitting outside in the fresh air.”

Being outside and working creatively encourages mind and body reconnection. “Engaging with the natural world is a sensory experience, putting you in touch with what you can see, hear, smell and touch, allowing you to come gently back into your body.” Vicky told us.

Here you can find a Mindful Photo Walk activity to get you started and focused on nature and the great outdoors.

Connecting face-to-face within communities

Public Health England says that ‘community life and social connections underpin good health.’  Social networks are the very building blocks of wellbeing which is why Kids Inspire has a Community Engagement arm that focuses at any one time, on a geographical location to learn and understand the communities that exist within it.

‘Community includes the relationships, bonds, identities, and interests that join people together and give them a shared stake in a place, service, or culture. Communities take many different forms, but all are made up of people who have something in common, such as living in the same area, or having common experiences, such as being supporters of the same football club.’

Currently, our team is focused on the area of Thurrock. They spend time there integrating and getting to know the communities and identifying key partners or destinations. They do this to gain an understanding of how Kids Inspire can help by delivering tools and training to enable communities to strengthen and feel empowered.

An important part of integrating within a community is to be seen.

Coming up this week: Our Community Engagement Team will be at Grays Shopping centre (at the back of Burger King) at 11am and 2pm. They are inviting the local community to come and chat to them and their Expert by Experience, 14-year-old Joseph, who will be on hand to talk about all things ‘emotional wellbeing’ and being a young person today.

Training to connect with a young person

Kids Inspire centres it’s services on improving youth mental health and in a bid to shift the landscape, alongside its bespoke trauma-informed therapy, the charity offers tools to empower key people (the systems around a child) to help.

Whether parent, teacher, or volunteer working within a community group, then training to understand and support young people impacted by trauma is open to all. This week a training session was held with 150 people signing up to listen in, which is positive for the young people that they know or work with and will go a long way to making an impact on the youth mental health crisis.

14-year-old, Joseph - an expert by experience - recently shared: "It’s easier for young people to open up to someone they are not familiar with. It’s easier to open up as you have a sense of freedom and less fear of judgment.” It is this token comment that backs up the theory behind the ‘why’ to train and gain new skills to help to improve a connection with a young person.

There are still so many more that this training is relevant for as according to the Essex Mental Health and Wellbeing strategy, an estimated 22,500 children and young people in Essex have a mental health problem that requires specialist help. With that in mind we can say that there are at least two responsible adults (parent/carer and teacher), but usually more, in a child’s life, and that this training would be relevant and beneficial to at least 45,000 adults, and that’s just in Essex.

The training is accessible to everyone and there is no prior knowledge needed.  It provides an introduction to mental health and trauma-informed practice - where we ask, ‘What has happened to you?’ rather than ‘what is wrong with you?’  The tools of stabilisation are shared alongside a basic understanding of the traumatised brain, the theory of attachment and interventions that support recovery.

There is relevant training coming up all the time for those willing to embark on the ‘train to connect’ journey.