Often, OCD and anxiety are linked and it is important for parents to understand the relationship between them, how to help their child manage OCD behaviours, and when to seek appropriate support and clinical help. This webinar recording, featuring child psychiatrist, Dr Anna Conway Morris, will help to shed light on the nature of OCD in children.
When children are feeling wobbly about something, evidence shows that it can really help to ease their anxiety if they work out what is worrying them, who can help and how to make themselves feel better. Use this worksheet to help younger children steady their wobbles.
It’s really important to ensure that mistakes are seen as a normal part of learning, innovation and effort. This list contains books for young people of all ages, which will help them to see that mistakes are there to learn from and that they are welcome in your home or school.
Normalising mistakes in family life is crucial in building children’s resilience and giving them the confidence to give things a go, even when they might not get them right the first time. After all, the greatest innovators and inventors in the world made countless mistakes on the road to creating something magnificent. Find out why it’s so important to ensure that, in your household, mistakes are seen as a normal part of learning, innovation and effort.
Our researcher of the month, Dr Jerica Radez, talks to Dr Weston about barriers and facilitators to help-seeking for teens with anxiety or depression. They discuss Dr Radez’s recent paper, examining how parents, schools and GPs can best encourage adolescents to seek help when they need it and Dr Radez tells us about her new simple screening tool, for use in any setting.
We have designed this journal for your teens to fill in over a 14 day period. It aims to encourage them to reflect on their experiences and achievements and build resilience. It provides prompts that can help them to develop and maintain a positive mindset and improve wellbeing.
One of the physiological manifestations of anxiety or worry, is that our breathing can become fast and shallow. The fact that our breathing feels shallow then increases our feelings of anxiety, which can turn into a vicious circle of panic. Actively slowing down our breathing can help to reduce our heart rate and lower our levels of anxiety. We’ve spoken to clinical psychologist Dr Anna Colton to find 5 top exercises that really work to calm us down.
There are huge numbers of books and resources available to help support children’s mental health and it can feel hard to know where to start. We’ve picked out some that come highly recommended and broken them down into easy to digest sections. You’ll find both fiction to inspire a positive mindset and practical workbooks.
Whilst this might feel easier said than done at the moment, during this critical period in our children’s lives, parental worries and stresses need to be managed as well as possible. We know that anxiety can run in families and that parental mental health is highly correlated with children’s mental health. So, this is definitely the time to think about self-care and prioritise being kind to yourself.
Use our list of potential worry points to identify stress triggers in your life. How do these contexts or scenarios make you feel? Our evaluative tool will help you to narrow down the key areas in your life where your levels of stress are high.
If your child is feeling a bit wobbly about returning to school or going into school on a particular day, it can be hard for them to express exactly why. This evaluative tool can help children of all ages narrow down how they are feeling. Use it as a springboard for further chat. As you listen, stay calm, curious and understanding. Whatever the ‘wobble/s’, they can be constructively tackled, together.
