Understanding your child’s mental health and wellbeing

The important relationships in your child’s life help shape their mental health and wellbeing, teaching important emotional skills they’ll use throughout their lives. Understanding your child’s mental health and wellbeing will help you to connect with them and provide the best support to nurture confidence, resilience and empathy, setting them up to thrive.

This is a free short course designed to frame our courses Understanding your child: from toddler to teenager or Understanding your child with additional needs. It provides a deeper understanding of mental health for parents who might be concerned about mental wellbeing or just want to learn more about it.

Following this course will introduce the Solihull Approach’s psychoanalytic pillars of containment, reciprocity, and behaviour to help you understand more about creating positive connections and relationships to support and nurture emotional wellbeing. You don’t need to be an expert or have any previous knowledge of mental health to follow this course – the content is simple and easy to follow, broken down into manageable units.

Understanding your child’s mental health and wellbeing will help you to tune into how you can help your child or teenager process their emotions effectively and also understand mental health difficulties such as depression, anxiety and self-harm.

Understanding your child’s mental health and wellbeing is for all parents, grandparents and carers of children aged between six months to 19 years. The resources are tailored so that whatever their age, you can use the ideas and techniques to help better understand your child, their mental health and how to nurture them.

Like all of our courses for parents and carers, it has been developed by a team of Clinical Psychologists, Child Psychotherapists, Health Visitors, Child and Family Practitioners and, importantly parents. Everything you will follow and learn in the course has been informed by experience and is designed to be practical to help you and your family in your everyday interactions. You’ll also learn about the foundations of wellbeing and mental health, as well as how our brains work at different times in our lives and what this means for the way we think and express ourselves in childhood and as adults.

The course follows a series of short units to make up Part 1, taking between 20-30 minutes. You’re then encouraged to follow our full-length courses before returning to follow Part 2 here to reflect on your learning and areas of focus.

Full-length courses

• Understanding your child: from toddler to teenager
• Understanding your child with additional needs

The first Module covers ways children may process emotions that will help shape the approaches and ideas around the sections covered in Understanding your child, so this means it needs to be followed in order, one Module at a time. You don’t need to do it all in one go, and our advice is to take breaks and spread out your learning.

Understanding your child’s mental health and wellbeing is designed for all parents in any situation, but you might find that perhaps you begin to feel you would benefit from more personalised or specialist support, so there are some additional resources signposted throughout to guide you.

We know that there are many different families, with different backgrounds, shapes and sizes. We have tried to consider some of the different needs of families in this course, but it hasn’t been possible to account for all backgrounds. If your personal situation isn’t reflected, we still hope that you find something helpful in the main ideas about developing close, connected relationships between parents and children and welcome your feedback to improve its relevance.