Let’s hear every child’s voice this Children’s Mental Health Week

Vicky Lysons, Clinical Impact Manager and Art Psychotherapist

It’s Children’s Mental Health Week and Heart Essex invited Vicky Lysons, our Clinical Impact Manager and Art Psychotherapist, to talk about the current state of children’s mental health.

Read on to hear Vicky’s thoughts on the conversations being held during this awareness week.

How would you describe the current state of children’s mental health?

We are finding that children and young people are struggling, and this is reflected in our referrals and people who are coming to us for our service.  

“56% of the children who come to us are presenting with four or more concerns. For context, pre-pandemic that was maybe one or two.”

The number of concerns and the complexity of them is much higher now than it was three or four years ago. This also tallies with a recent report from the NHS in November last year which stated that one in five young people aged 8 to 16 have a probable mental health condition. The seriousness of youth mental health concerns is reflected locally and nationwide - children are struggling at the moment and there's a lot of pressure and demand being placed on them.

Have factors like the cost-of-living crisis and social media made things worse?

The cost of living

The cost-of-living crisis has certainly added additional pressure onto families. Young people will be seeing their parents perhaps more stressed about bills or struggling more with life.

This is particularly true after coming out of ‘lockdown’ where essentially it felt like everything was back to normal. Families were still figuring out how to do ‘normal’ again, and what normal looked like. And then an increase in energy bills came, followed by an increase in interest rates, which in turn impacted food costs.

So yes, that added pressure of the cost of living is a stress that will be absorbed by everybody. Children are very tuned in to how their parents are while coping with stress and anxiety, so there will be ripples from this that they feel.

Social media

You could say that social media is making things worse. If we view social media as a window to the world, if we look through everything is pretty much unfiltered. It also means that young people, like all of us, have views into events that are going on in the world that (before social media) we wouldn't ordinarily have seen on a day-to-day basis. And of course, some of those things are incredibly shocking.

Social media and all its choices

Add to this the way that young people are using social media to interact with each other, particularly in their adolescent teenage years when social development is much more at the forefront. And then not being able to necessarily have that break from friends and school when you go home, things build up. So, yes, social media is an added complexity that concerns young people, and it can make things harder, but it doesn't always have to.

The way we live our lives – looking through that social media window - presents an opportunity for parents and children to have open conversations about how social media is accessed and used. They could be introduced in the same way that you would talk to your child before they go out with their friends to set boundaries in place. The same applies to social media.

Additionally, parents encourage their children to share any worries or concerns from their day-to-day lives and applying this same encouragement to open communication around social media would help them to feel comfortable sharing related concerns.

It’s about keeping that open communication so you can navigate it together. There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, it is dependent on the family and the needs of the young people, as well as the expectations that the family have of each other.

Does there need to be more protection for children when it comes to social media?

I think the need for better online safety and protections for young people, particularly around social media platforms, is being taken more and more seriously. The introduction of the Online Safety Act at the end of last year offers some guidance and perhaps brings some weight to the matter, which is positive.

Previously our CEO at Kids Inspire Sue Bell has spoken about the need for social media platforms to take more responsibility for protecting young people and to make it safer for them to engage online.

While it's not about shutting them out completely, or anybody for that matter, it is about making it a genuinely safe space. For example, we all have seen more ways of reporting online bullying or harassment, bt beyond that it is understanding whether they are effective enough. Do they protect the people they need to protect? Do they reduce cyberbullying and what about the related anxiety that comes from online platforms?

“It is important for us to remember that owning a smartphone and having access to online platforms does require a level of maturity.”

Going back to my earlier response, I would encourage families to keep an open communication and to have conversations about:

• does it feel like the right time for my child to have access to that?

• are there controls that can be put in place?

Parents having access to or sight of what's happening on their child's platform in open conversations can also be considered as parental oversight.

There are several things I think need to be done to make these spaces safer for children. It shouldn't just be down to the young person to make it safe for themselves. They need the people around them to show them what ‘safe online’ looks like and the tech companies can be involved in this on behalf of us all, and especially young people.

Is there enough support for children?

In short, no, and in terms of what more could be done, obviously the ideal is that there's more capacity in the current services to support young people. Certainly, at a grassroots level, simply talking about mental health and mental wellbeing is a positive thing because it increases awareness.

The theme for Children's Mental Health Awareness Week is ‘My voice matters’, which emphasises the need to hear what young people are saying and what it is they need.

By telling and sharing these stories we hope that it reaches the people who can make change happen.

Communication and conversations

Having conversations about mental health and wellbeing is important because it encourages open conversations and in doing this it reduces stigma.

During the pandemic, people became much more aware of what mental health means to them. It's become much more in the forefront of the conversation. Reducing stigma - recognising that everybody has mental health. It fluctuates and that's normal. And sometimes we need a little bit of extra help, and that's fine.

This year, for Children's Mental Health Week, we also really want to promote the importance of early intervention. For mental well-being, the earlier you can catch something and work with it and find the tools that are going to help you manage and cope the better. It means it's less likely for things to grow and become a much more entrenched issue and difficulty.

Engagement with school

We're seeing young people come to us with difficulties around school and engagement at school. There has been an increase in children and young people struggling with their engagement in school. Whether that's going in in the first instance or coping with that transition from home to school.  It could be going and then staying or engaging with the work, and for some, it's even going in at all that that's become almost untenable. The anxiety around it is so incredibly intense.

And this is something that's affecting huge numbers of young people. Locally and nationally. Nationally, the Centre for Social Justice published their ‘Lost but not forgotten - the reality of severe absence in report in schools post-lockdown’ in 2022. We've seen this reflected in our work, off the back of COVID, the pandemic and lockdowns. It’s another major issue that we're seeing young people cope with, school engagement and what that looks like to them. It’s a big stressor.

“The top concern is anxiety, and it's quite complex. Anxiety, school engagement and and what that looks like to them. We're also seeing young people being much more aware of world events, either through social media or through the way that the news is presented.”

Parental self-care

Something else to consider is the importance of parental self-care. I know this might sound a simplistic thing and I'm not suggesting that it is. But I would say it's important. I would encourage parents or carers of children, young people, to try and take moments to look after their own well-being.

One of the major benefits of this is that your child or young person will see you doing that. You'll be modelling it to them and that's one of the best ways to teach young people how to do something for themselves.

Show them what it looks like to balance yourself, to take a moment. And to recharge, regroup to ground yourself. Then they are more likely to at least have a blueprint on how to do that.

And then when it comes to building on their own capacity for self-care, they've got that there. it doesn't have to be something big; it can be something small, whatever works for you. But you know, using the classic oxygen mask analogy as well, you put your oxygen mask on first. You're in a much better position to care for the people around you and put theirs on. Same applies here.