Online Resources to Support Your Child’s Mental Health

by Monique Staples & Michaela Myles

The first step to supporting your child’s mental health is making sure you are educated around infant mental health. Below there are a variety of online resources available to help educate yourself so that you might start to educate your children on the importance of infant mental health.

InBrief: Early Childhood Mental Health

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L41k2p-YRCs

To begin, here is a summary of Infant Mental Health: what it is, why it is important to support, and what are the early signs of infant mental health problems. This video will provide you with a foundation of knowledge as you start to create your toolkit of infant mental health support (Harvard University, 2015).

Infant and Early Mental Health Promotion

https://imhpromotion.ca/

Toronto Sick Kids’ hospital has a web resource called Infant and Early Mental Health Promotion where they have searchable catalogs of information including the latest research on children’s mental health. Being able to further educate yourself on infant mental health will help you to be better equipped on how to support your children through their early years and have accurate information when engaging in conversations with them. Using this searchable catalog you can look up specific infant mental health issues that are arising within your family dynamic specifically (The Hospital for Sick Children Toronto, 2019).

Once you have a foundation of knowledge around Infant Mental Health, you will need to find ways to engage in age-appropriate conversations with your children around mental health. There are many incredible resources to be found on YouTube to help start these conversations. Here a few that we felt were a great start:

Why Do We Get Angry?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clwt7iXF1Mg

Explaining the specific reactions around anger and how one can begin to cope with anger is a great tool to teach your children as they begin wrestling with the frustrations of everyday life. This educative video using animation to highlight how anger affects the body and mind (Peekaboo Kidz, 2019).

Lucy’s Blue Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmrUV8v-KQg

Lucy’s Blue Day takes a child through a day of emotions and what situations may stir up the various emotions. You may ask your child if they can remember a time when they felt joy, anger, sadness, envy, or fear and then begin to ask them why they feel it is important to be able to name these feelings (Lucy's Blue Day, 2019).

A to Z of Coping Strategies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EXpkVw3fh0

Now that your child understands that they have a variety of emotions, it is now time to teach them how to regulate and cope with their emotions. This video provides you with a list of various coping techniques you can teach your children and benefit from as a family. Make sure to reinforce and congratulate them when they use a coping skill during a hard moment. Get creative! You can create posters using these techniques and ask them for contributions of soothing activities (NHS Hampshire Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, 2018).