Importance of children and young people’s mental health

It’s Children’s Mental Health Week, an important week which gives us an opportunity to reflect on and think about children’s emotional wellbeing.

We work with a large number of children and young people here, they are all unique, but many have had early experiences characterised by loss and trauma. We understand how vital looking at and understanding these early developmental experiences is. Every child who comes into our care is offered a baseline psychological screening. This screening means we can provide integrated, psychologically informed care.

We also know that early intervention is best. We therefore place great value in equipping our staff with the skills and expertise they need to be able to identify mental health problems early on and work therapeutically with the children and young people in our care.

We also ensure we care for our foster carers so they can, in turn, provide the optimal care and therapeutically informed experience 24/7. This means our assessment and therapy teams can work alongside our social care colleagues.  

This week we will be sharing resources with our staff to support them in identifying and making sense of potential issues early on. The themes we are running are:

Trauma

Attachment

Dissociation

Shame

The needs of children and young people are ever-changing, and mental health issues are on the rise. We know that children in the care system are more likely to face mental health problems and that’s why we offer evidence-based practice when screening, assessing and working with the young people we look after.

There can be a drive to just think about the here and now. Here we take great care in looking at the past and present experiences to think about what might be affecting a child, we continually seek to make sense of the communication behind the behaviour. We then work with our colleagues to find solutions to best support the young person.

We draw on nearly three decades of experience. This experience means we know what works and how best to support the children and young people who need us most. We know that our shared practice, language, understanding throughout our integrated provision is at the ‘core’ of making this work.