Activities and resources to support your child's mental health and wellbeing

Kent Resilience Hub You may find yourself looking for ways that you can help your child to feel better and become more resilient. This includes ways to better manage the ups and downs that life can bring. One way to begin to make a difference to your child is to understand what resilience is and how you and your child can improve and maintain it. HeadStart Kent recognise that there are 6 areas of a young person's life that fit together to help them become more resilient. This makes them more able to bounce back when they have a tough time. This area of the website is designed to help you learn about these areas, provide you with tools and information so you can nurture resilience and be supportive when your child is finding life difficult. The hub has also brought together information on other places you can look for support if you feel you need more than the hub can offer.

The Contented Child The Contented Child provide course for parents and school staff. They are currently offering all their courses for half price to support mental health week.

Creative Education Website for training courses to support your child. Creative Education has a variety of courses some of which are free. Some are relevant for supporting children at home during lockdown and others focus on more general wellbeing.

Please read below for tips in supporting your child's mental health and a link to the Every Mind Matters Website.

NHS’s Top 5 Tips for supporting children and young people’s mental wellbeing as they go back out into the world (please view all tips on Every Mind Matters website):

Be there to listen
Ask the children and young people you look after how they are doing regularly so they get used to speaking about their feelings.
Stay involved in their life
Show interest in their life and the things that are important to them.
Support positive routines
Be a positive role model and support positive behaviours including regular bedtime routines, healthy eating and getting active.
Encourage their interests
Being active, creative, learning things and being a part of a team are all good for mental health. Support children and young people to explore their interests.
Take what they say seriously
Help the children and young people you look after feel valued in what they say and help them work through difficult emotions.

Random acts of kindness from Twinkl. This is a lovely activity to help boost the mental health of others. Research also shows that helping others can be beneficial to our own mental health as well.

Daily Acts of Kindness

Big Life Journal has shared these free '7 helpful hints' to support positive feedback for children. They report It’s only natural for children to resist feedback, especially when it’s corrective. Studies show being critiqued can feel threatening, triggering the fight-flight-freeze stress response. These helpful hints will support positive interactions when communicating feedback

7 Helpful Tips On Sharing Feedback With Your Child UK- Big Life Journal

Dover Smarts Project's Well-being Guide to Isolation

Resources to boost your child's well-being during the Covid-19 lockdown

Well-being activities for kids stuck indoors-5 min fun

Cosmic kids Online yoga activities for children

Mind Some information on ways to reduce your family's anxiety during the Corona Virus Pandemic.

Helpful hints. 9 ways to help stay positive.

Try some mindfulness and calming techniques with your children. These are great for exploring the environment using all your senses and great for a calming activity.