May 2021 - Mummageddon

Helping Children Express Emotion

Before having children and taking a career break I worked with children struggling with complex mental health conditions.

I have a degree in Psychology and a Masters degree in Child and Adolescent mental health as well as being a qualified children’s nurse.

For 13 years I worked in inpatient CAMHS and the components I learnt for providing a therapeutic environment in my work, I also feel are important components for providing a therapeutic home, conducive to raising happy and healthy minded children.

In this post I am going to discuss the basic underpinning principles used in my previous work, which I find to be useful foundations to utilise in my daily parenting. In my experience they promote and foster an environment that nurtures and encourages a healthy narrative around the expression of emotion.

Parental Anxiety: The Ghost that haunts play

As a child, the constant mantra to all activities was to “be careful”.The simple activities of childhood, prefixed with fear of harm.

In this post I reflect upon the anxiety projected to me as a child, its manifestation in my own parental anxiety, the effect this has on my children, and the work I’m doing to try and end this cycle.

Like a ghost of anxieties past, haunting first our childhoods and then that of our children, the fear must be faced and challenged, to be overcome and finally laid to rest.