A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Pixabay Images We all want what’s best for our children. But our idea of what is best for them might not always jive with theirs. Often parents will give a nudge towards the decision they think is correct, trying to find that delicate balance between encouraging and pushing too hard. But what is pushing [...]
Getty Images For hundreds of years, young boys have been brought up with the belief that to be a “real” man, you have to be tough. The notion of having physical resilience as a way to get by in life seems to have overshadowed the equally important need for mental resilience. Artist Grayson [...]
Flikr Images A key protective factor enabling young people to make a successful transition into adulthood has been identified as a relationship with a caring adult outside the young person’s immediate family.[1] In a study on resilience, Emily Werner and a team of professionals followed the development of children born in 1955 on [...]
Flikr Images The success of a school, district or educational program is often measured by how well students score on academic tests or whether they graduate on time. But as a school counselor, my experience says that these big-picture measures of success don’t tell the whole story. Every day there are countless non-academic [...]
Google Images Schools have great intentions with regard to wellbeing, but how often do they measure their own effectiveness at developing it? How well do schools consistently teach and develop targeted areas of wellbeing with the goal that when a student leaves their care, he or she is more skilled in specific life [...]
Stock Images It’s now estimated that 1 in 7 children experience mental health difficulties. Half of all serious mental health problems begin before the age of 14. We also know however that early intervention to address difficulties can improve the chance of long-term mental health and wellbeing (KidsMatter, 2015). The work of Paul A. LeBuffe, Valerie [...]
Gillian Laub / Getty Images Here’s the problem: For all our talk about noncognitive skills, nobody has yet found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their [...]
University of Pennsylvania Martin Seligman has been raising the profile of positive psychology over the past two decades. Seligman's notion of good mental health boils down to five key domains that together form the acronym PERMA: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and purpose, and accomplishments. This list includes the five PERMA attributes, as [...]
Stock Images Given current national statistics, we can safely assume there are very few young people who haven’t known someone who has deliberately injured themselves by cutting, self-battery, overdosing or intentionally participating in risky behaviour. In 2015 the Australian Child and Adolescent Survey reported that approximately 10% of 12 – 17 year olds have self-harmed, with 8% self-harming [...]
Nina, 10, worries about terrorists and getting things wrong at school. Photo: The Sydney Morning Herald Ten-year-olds are at the top of their game, it's the time in their lives they are most likely to feel happy, confident and ready to take on the world. But by age 15, that resilience has plummeted. [...]
