What is Healthier Minds?

In East Renfrewshire, it is important that all children experience positive mental wellbeing. This helps us manage stress, build relationships and learn well. Everyone that features in a child’s life, for example family, teachers, friends, and people in the community, have a role in supporting positive mental wellbeing. Healthier Minds is a tool to support children like you, parents/carers, and adults that work with children, to work in partnership to nurture children’s wellbeing. It does this using the national approach called Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC).

In this section you can learn more about mental wellbeing and things that affect it. It also describes different types of feelings that children may experience. There also lots of ideas for ways to talk about feelings, manage stress or “big” feelings, and practice relaxation.

What is mental wellbeing?

It is normal to experience challenges when growing up. These challenges can affect how we feel and often come after big life changes e.g. moving to a new school, losing a family member, or parents separating.

It can be helpful to think about mental health on a scale. At one end we feel happy and content, and the other we could experience challenges that might feel difficult to manage. Have a think about today,  where you would be on the scale below?

It is normal to not always feel happy and content. Sometimes challenges in our life lead us to have big emotions that are difficult to manage. These can push us down on the scale, and sometime it can seem difficult to know how to move back to feeling happy and content again. Click on the link below to have a look at some of the feelings we might experience…

Big Feelings!