Young people aren’t making it up.
We can talk about increasing levels of anxiety, school avoidance, emotional dysregulation and children struggling with their mental health. We can talk about waiting lists, stretched services and schools trying to support increasingly complex needs.
But I think there’s another conversation we need to have.
What are we actually teaching children about their own mental health before things become difficult?
After more than 25 years working with children and families, this is something I feel increasingly strongly about.
We are still very good at waiting.
We wait until a child becomes anxious. Until their behaviour changes. Until they stop attending school. Until things become difficult at home. Sometimes until they are in crisis.
Then we start trying to work out what’s happening.
Why are we waiting that long?
At The Parachute Project, psychoeducation sits at the heart of much of what we do, and we’re now looking at how we take that much further through our work with schools.
Because children need to understand themselves.
What happens in my brain and body when I’m overwhelmed?
What does fight, flight or freeze feel like for me?
What are my early signs that things are becoming too much?
Why can I cope with something one day and not the next?
Why can I hold everything together at school and completely fall apart when I get home?
And most importantly:
What actually helps me?
I think we need to start seeing psychoeducation as much more than an intervention once something has gone wrong.
Used properly, psychoeducation can be part of de-escalation.
Before repeatedly telling a child to regulate, we need to help them understand what regulation actually means for them.
Before asking them to change a behaviour, help them understand what their brain and body might be communicating.
And before assuming a child is being difficult, defiant or refusing, look at what happened before.
Was there anxiety? Sensory overload? A demand they couldn’t process? Uncertainty? Fear of getting something wrong? A change they weren’t expecting?
Understanding doesn’t mean removing boundaries or expectations. It means we’re far more likely to respond in a way that actually helps.
And sometimes changing the language changes the whole conversation.
“Why are you behaving like this?”
feels very different from:
“What happened just before this became difficult?”
“You need to calm down.”
is very different from:
“What normally helps when your body starts feeling like this?”
And instead of simply saying a child is refusing school, perhaps we should be asking:
“What is making school feel impossible at the moment?”
Language matters. The way we approach the conversation matters.
This is particularly important for children with SEND and neurodivergent children.
Many of these children are struggling enormously. We need to be prepared to question whether some of the approaches we’ve always used still fit with what we now understand about children’s needs.
A child who is already overwhelmed may not be able to tell us why.
They might communicate it through behaviour. They might mask. Shut down. Ask lots of questions because knowing what is going to happen makes them feel safer. They may need movement, quiet, sensory input or much longer to process what’s being said.
So psychoeducation has to be adapted to the child, not the child expected to adapt to our way of delivering it.
For one child that might be visual. For another it might be practical or play-based. It might involve sensory activities, movement, repetition or going back over the same idea many times.
And we need to teach these things when children are able to learn them — not introduce them for the first time in the middle of a crisis.
The principle can be the same.
The way we deliver it shouldn’t be.
This is another part I think we sometimes underestimate.
If we want children to remember what we’re teaching them, we need to make the experience memorable.
And a huge part of that is making the child feel valued.
A warm welcome. A space they want to be in. Good-quality resources that have been thought about properly. Activities that make sense to them. Remembering what they’re interested in. Giving them choices. Taking time to notice what works.
These things might sound small, but they’re not.
Children remember how an experience made them feel.
When a child feels safe, noticed and valued, we have a much better opportunity to help them learn something about themselves that they can actually take away and use.
That’s particularly important for children who may already have spent a lot of time feeling that they are the problem.
A five-year-old doesn’t need a complicated explanation of neuroscience.
But they can begin to understand:
“My body is trying to tell me something.”
Then we build on it.
Fight, flight and freeze. Thoughts and feelings. Sensory processing. Anxiety. Regulation. Masking. Coping strategies. Their individual triggers and their early warning signs.
The language grows as the child grows.
By secondary school, imagine if that child already had years of understanding to draw on.
That’s very different from introducing these ideas for the first time when they are 14 and haven’t attended school for six months.
And this is why I don’t think a whole-school approach can simply be something delivered for a few weeks and then finished.
It needs to become part of the language of the school.
Children understand it.
Staff understand it.
Parents understand it.
And they’re all talking about the same things.
This is a big part of what we’re trying to develop through The Parachute Project.
A common language that starts young, develops with the child and can be adapted for different needs.
Because one child may need movement and another quiet.
One needs lots of information and another becomes overwhelmed by too much language.
One child’s anxiety is obvious. Another child’s might look like perfect behaviour, constant questions or desperately trying to get everything right.
So perhaps some of our starting points need to be really simple:
Observe before interpreting.
Ask rather than assume.
Understand before trying to change.
We talk a lot about early intervention in children’s mental health.
For me, this is early intervention.
Not waiting until a child meets a threshold.
Not waiting until school attendance has collapsed.
Not waiting until behaviour becomes impossible to ignore.
And not reserving an understanding of mental health for children already accessing specialist services.
Start young. Adapt it. Repeat it. Build on it.
Because imagine the difference if children could grow up able to say:
“I know what happens to me when I’m overwhelmed. I recognise the signs. I know what helps me. And the adults around me understand it too.”
That’s where I think we need to get to.
