Children's Mental Health Week 2022

Children’s Mental Health Week is a week to celebrate and bring awareness to the mental health of children and young people. The annual, national awareness week is run by a charity called Place2be and takes place this year from 7-13 February 2022.This year’s theme is ‘Growing Together’.

Growing Together is about finding ways to help each other grow emotionally. Challenges and setbacks can help us to grow and adapt and trying new things can help us to move beyond our comfort zone and discover new things about ourselves. Growing emotionally is a gradual process that happens over time.

For Children's Mental Health Week 2022, we will be supporting the week by encouraging children (and adults) to consider how they have grown and how they can help others to grow. You can find more resources for the week on Place2be’s website.

We will also be releasing a podcast to help celebrate and support the week, in which we will look at the 5 steps to wellbeing. Throughout the week we would like you to practice some of the activities and strategies to look after your own mental health and the mental health of those around you.

You can listen to the podcast on our website.

What are the 5 steps to wellbeing?

The 5 steps to wellbeing are steps you can take to improve your wellbeing. These can help you feel more positive and help you to manage how you are feeling.

Connect with others

Connecting with each other is all about reaching out to each other, talking to each other, and listening to each other. Good examples of connecting with each other are:

• Spending times with people who make us feel good.
• Joining groups or clubs.
• Online gaming can be a good way to connect, within moderation and safely.
• Feeing connected can really help us to feel happier and more secure. Connecting with people can also help us to create new relationships.

Be active

Being active means sitting less and moving more. Physical activity can help us to maintain positive mental health. There are many ways to be active. Some of our ideas are:

• Going for a walk
• Physical games like “just dance”
• Trampoline parks
• Running
• Biking
• Yoga
• Stretching
• Walking to school
• Any activity that means you move around more.

It’s important that you do what you can. This can be different for everyone as we all have different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses - move in whatever way it works for you. Studies show being physically active can help to improve mental health. Being active can also help you sleep better and lift your mood. Being active releases feel good hormones that can give us more energy. These feel-good hormones help us to manage stress and anxiety. Being active also helps to give the brain something to focus on.

Take Notice

Taking notice is all about being present in the moment and is also often referred to as mindfulness. Taking notice is all about focusing on the things around you, paying more attention to present moment, and focusing on your thoughts, feelings, and body.

Some ways to practice mindfulness are:

• Wearing your WOW glasses - trying to spot things you haven’t seen before; this can be done anywhere but is great to do outside or in a scavenger hunt.
• Look for things of a certain colour or that start with a certain letter.
• Practice 5-4-3-2-1 grounding discussed in our mindfulness podcast and blog previously. 
• My Happy Place - Healthy Minds Lincolnshire

Taking notice helps us to enjoy life more and understand ourselves better. It can positively change how we feel about life and how we approach challenges. Most of these activities can be done wherever you are but it can be useful at times to find a safe and quiet space to practice mindfulness. Removing technology can also be helpful to ensure you are not distracted you could use the do not disturb function on your devices.

Keep learning

Keep learning is about trying something new or trying something that you’ve always wanted to try. This can help us to find new things that we enjoy as well as helping us to connect with others. Some ideas of new things you could try are:

• New food
• A new book
• A new hairstyle
• A new hobby
• Crafts

By trying new things, we often learn new things about ourselves and find things that we didn’t know we were interested in until we tried.

Sometimes we try new things and realise we don’t like them or that we aren’t very good at them. This is still beneficial as it helps us to understand more about our own likes and dislikes and what we are good at. Throughout history there has been some fascinating inventions that were created when their makers were trying something new, but it didn’t go to plan!

Alexander Fleming spent some of his time trying to find a new wonder drug to cure diseases. Eventually he gave up as he thought his idea wasn’t working and so he threw away his equipment. Later, he found one of his petri dishes was growing mould. That mould was used to create penicillin, a drug that we use regularly to help with fighting disease. 

Richard Jones, a Naval Engineer was attempting to create a meter to monitor the power on battle ships. While working on this he used tension springs. One of these fell on floor and bounced around the room. From this he created the well-known Slinky toy!

This shows us that even making mistakes when trying new things can have unexpected positive outcomes.

Give

When talking about giving we don’t always mean to give physical gifts. There are lots of ways you can give to others and some of these are simple and easy. Some ideas are:

• Give your time – this could be helping someone with something
• Give your attention – listening to someone when they need support
• Give your energy – Playing with someone new on the playground
• Giving compliments
• Giving someone a smile

It is also important to give to yourself. Giving to others isn’t just good for them but is also good for us. When we give, we are rewarded with feeling good and getting a warm fuzzy feeling inside. Helping others helps us to feel good.

Giving is also about giving to ourselves. Giving things your best effort helps us to feel good, we often feel better when we know we have given 100% into a task. Giving yourself time to relax and have me time is important; it can help our wellbeing to have time away from everything. It is Okay to concentrate on our own well-being through Self-care.