How does everyday practice support children's mental health and wellbeing?

The early years provide a crucial opportunity for us to help children play, learn and develop. These experiences lay the foundations for children's future outcomes - including their mental health and wellbeing. But what could we focus on to give children a positive start?

UNICEF’s Understanding and supporting mental health in infancy and early childhood toolkit states, ‘being mentally healthy in infancy and early childhood enables babies and young children to understand and manage emotions, to experience nurturing, meaningful relationships, and to explore, play and learn. Being mentally healthy in this life stage also enables children to develop the capacities to be mentally healthy throughout life’ (Hogg and Moody, 2023, p. 2).

All our early interactions with children play a powerful role in their wellbeing, play and learning. We focus on building secure, responsive relationships with children and providing welcoming learning environments in which they can safely play and explore.

In previous blogs, we have discussed how self-regulation and personal, social and emotional development approaches can boost children’s wellbeing now, and support their future mental health. Talk is one important element that ties these approaches together.

For our younger children, we might focus on teaching and modelling the use of emotion vocabulary during play or through stories. As children’s emotional awareness grows, we use comments or questions to encourage them to talk about their thoughts and feelings.

In the video below, reception teacher Sarah models calming techniques with her class. As you watch, notice how Sarah shows curiosity about the children’s feelings and sensitively uses comments and questions to explore them.

Think about your own practice – are there times of the day or particular activities which might lend themselves to conversations with children about their feelings? If you work with younger or pre-verbal children, which strategies might you use to develop these interactions?

Most of us working in the early years are not trained mental health experts. But we play an important role in noticing changes to children’s wellbeing and taking opportunities to signpost families for additional support or referring them to external professionals.

As joyful and rewarding as our work can be, it is often demanding and can be stressful too. As part of Time to Talk Day, it’s important to focus on the wellbeing of leaders and educators in settings. Anna Freud have published a resource to help teams reflect on staff wellbeing in their own settings.

To learn more about how PSED and self-regulation approaches can support children’s mental health and wellbeing, download our PDF guide here.

Visit the Early Years hub to see more of our resources around teaching and learning in the early years.