Emotional Wellbeing

What is the importance of emotional health and wellbeing ?

What is emotional health?

Emotional health is an important part of our overall health. It is about how we think and feel. It is about our overall sense of wellbeing and our ability to cope with life's challenges and how we acknowledge and process our own emotions as well as those of others. People who are emotionally healthy are in control of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. They are aware of their emotions, and they have the skills to manage them whether they are positive or negative.

Parents and children need good emotional health to allow them to create and sustain an emotionally healthy culture at home. During your engagement with Nina's Nurture, we will focus on how you can create a home environment that fosters the positive emotional health and wellbeing of all the family.

Importance of nurture

To have a nurturing relationship with your child is to raise your child in a caring, loving, trusting and empathetic home. By adopting nurturing approaches and focusing on emotional growth parents can help their children to boost their confidence and self-esteem and develop emotional resilience. This is at the heart of the Mindful Monkeys® Better Together programme.

By working on this together with you and your child I can help your children to understand how to manage their emotions and learn how to empathise more with others which will lead to the family forming stronger and more connected relationships.

Why do we need to focus on emotional wellbeing?

We are parenting in a world which is vastly different from when we were children and this generation face many new challenges. Children are faced with different pressures within their academic learning at school, in their peer groups, when attending the wide range of after school activities and their exposure to the world of online gaming and social media.

Many children find it difficult to make sense of and navigate these different situations. We need to think of innovative ways to support children who are feeling increasingly overwhelmed and unsure within their lives. Children and young people need to be surrounded by adults who can understand their vital role in supporting them develop their emotional resilience. They also need adults around them who themselves feel supported enough to be able to respond during moments of stress and have the strength to help their children face this variety of different challenges. Helping you to achieve this goal is at the heart of Nina's Nurture.

The facts

One in six children aged five to sixteen were identified as having a probable mental health problem in July 2020, a huge increase from one in nine in 2017. That's five children in every classroom. (NHS Digital, 2020)

Emotional disorders, particularly anxiety and depression, are on the rise. We are just beginning to understand how the increasing prevalence of social media is negatively impacting young people's emotional health ( CAMHS- Children and Young People's Mental Health)

10 percent of children and young people (aged 5-16 years) have a clinically diagnosable mental health problem, yet 70 percent of children and adolescents who experience mental health problems have not had appropriate interventions at a sufficiently early age (Children's Society 2008)

By the time they're 16, roughly 3 children in every class will have experienced a mental health problem. And thousands will struggle to get the help they need. (SAMH Going to be all right 2017)

These figures can seem frightening but thankfully all is not lost. Our government, education experts and people in our society are recognising the importance of supporting our youngster's mental wellbeing and we are thinking of solutions to these problems. I see Nina's Nurture as being part of this solution.