Children's Mental Health Week 2022 - Growing Together

This week it is Children’s Mental Health week and the theme is ‘Growing Together’. Can you think of ways you have grown? It’s easy to think of ways you have grown physically but what about emotionally?

It’s easy to see how we grow and change physically as we grow from babies to children to adults. How have you changed since you were a little baby? You probably will think about how much taller you are, or that you can now walk and talk. But human beings also grow emotionally. That is much harder to see and it might seem like we’re not growing at all.

Growing emotionally means the way we deal with things improves and changes. One example is not crying when we’re hungry like we did when we were a baby, once we are old enough we learn to speak and explain how we are feeling using words. Another example is how we deal with challenges we face, once we might have given up really quickly but as we grow emotionally we learn to try a bit harder, even when things get tough. 

Growing emotionally is thinking about how we deal with our emotions and feelings and also how we behave towards each other. It also means how we deal with difficult things that might happen and our attitude towards challenges. 

Trees grow from tiny saplings into enormous grand trees. Each year a tree grows a little bit and if you look at a cross section of a tree trunk you can see the rings to show that growth. Some years the rings can be quite big as the tree has had the perfect conditions to grow but other years the trees rings can be quite narrow…but it still grows. Even if the conditions haven’t been great and its been too cold or too dry a tree will still grow which is quite amazing!

Emotional growth can sometimes be a slow process that happens over time and sometimes we might not feel like we are growing at all. It’s during these times we really need other to help and support us.

Just like trees we need the right support to grow too. Our family, teachers and friends can help us to believe in ourselves, support us and give us the confidence to try new things and be positive about the challenges we face. Even when we are finding things hard we are still growing emotionally, it just might be harder to see at the time and actually it might be a time where we are growing even more than usual. Learning from hard times or when we find things difficult is really important too. With the right support we can continue to grow and become the best versions of ourselves.