Children’s Mental Health Week: Know Yourself, Grow Yourself

Children’s Mental Health Week was established by the charity Place2Be in 2015 to empower children to share their thoughts and feelings about mental health. The organisation states that 1 in 5 children and young people are impacted by a mental health condition. It is therefore important that children feel comfortable talking about mental health, with the knowledge that they will be heard.

The theme for 2025 is Know Yourself, Grow Yourself, and is centred around encouraging self-awareness and understanding, making it easier to express thoughts and emotions. Place2Be has also partnered with Here4You, which is supported by The Walt Disney Company and the characters from the Inside Out films.

Know Yourself ‘Inside Out’

It is important to acknowledge how important the Inside Out films are with regards to encouraging young people to have a greater understanding of their thoughts and feelings.

The films personify and name key emotions as characters experienced by Riley – who is 11 years old in the first film, and 13 in the second. These characters are placed in charge of a control panel, a reflection of how Riley’s brain will process each emotion.

Visualising these different emotions, and showing how quickly they can change, could empower children to identify and begin to talk about their mental health. For example, young people may find it easier to explain that Anxiety and Fear ‘took the controls today’, whilst Joy was pushed away into a corner.

The character of Joy and how she is portrayed is an important one. In the films, her objective is for Riley to be happy all the time – something that all parents, guardians and carers can identify with. However, Joy needs to learn that she can’t stop Riley from feeling other emotions – and that it is just as important for her to feel sadness and fear as it is to feel happiness. By giving ourselves permission to feel the emotions we need to will help our ability to recover from negative thought patterns that could impact mental health.

Cleverly, new emotions are introduced for Inside Out 2, due to Riley becoming a teenager. These new characters reflect her older age, but also that new emotions can occur, replacing or adding to feelings already established. It can be alarming to suddenly feel a new emotion, and the films reflect this perfectly.

We highly recommend the Inside Out films, both for young people and parents/carers.

Children's Mental Health Week is supported by the characters from Inside Out

Image via Creative Commons licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

How TACT support children’s mental health

All young people in care are allocated their own local authority social worker, but TACT have a number of additional support services to help support the mental health of ALL children in our fostering households:

  • Engagement & Activity Practitioners (EAPs) & Children & Young People Wellbeing Practitioners (CWPs): our team of practitioners provide additional support for both children in care, and for the ‘birth’ children of our foster carers.

    All of our practitioners provide diverse, child-centred group activities as well as therapeutic one-to-one sessions. They work closely with a child’s social worker, foster carer and other professionals to help identify activities that align with a young person’s hobbies, interests and any additional needs they may have.

    These activities can have a profound and positive impact on mental health and wellbeing. Previous events have included pottery painting, Go Ape days out, equine therapy, visits to theme parks, shows and national residentials.

    Read more about our practitioners.

“My role as a Children & Young People Wellbeing Practitioner involves direct, therapeutic one-to-one work with fostered children using the PACE model. I work closely with the child’s foster carer and their Supervising Social Worker, along with Therapeutic Social Workers and Clinical Psychologists. This is to tailor support that meets the individual needs of the child. Using a trauma-informed approach, I support the child to best manage their emotions, behaviours, level of self-esteem and life transitions to promote the best outcomes for them”

Jess, TACT Children & Young People Wellbeing Practitioner

  • Connect: a free community exclusively for our care-experienced young people and adults aged 15 or over, that’s tailored to their needs and interests.  

    Connect provides its members with events, courses, freebies and discounts, and support and guidance, all available from an easy to navigate Connect Online Hub. What sets this apart from other support services and communities that TACT provide is that it is available to members into adulthood and beyond – potentially long after its members have become independent adults.

    What we offer reflects what our members tell us they want from their membership. We understand a community is a two-way street, so we embrace change, listen to members when co-creating together, and take a person-centred approach.

    Our members have the most important voice in Connect and their feedback is central to how we grow and change.

    Read more about Connect.

  • Education Service: a service that aims to ensure that young people can access their entitlement to a full time and appropriate education based on their age, ability and needs.

    However, our Education Service also advocates for children of all ages, ensuring that they are settled in the right educational surroundings. It also provides a Cultural Experiences Programme to further support the wellbeing of our young people.

    We want our young people to know that they are not alone, that they can be anything they want to be and that they can have a positive future.

    Read more about our Education Service.

The through line of all the services and communities that TACT provide is mental health – an initiative that starts with how we support our staff, through to how we prepare, train and support our amazing teams of foster carers – leading to the very heart of what we provide for our young people everyday.

#ChildrensMentalHealthWeek #KnowYourselfGrowYourself