Watch video of Harry Burns – write a reflection (1 hour)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEh3JG74C6s

Evidence: Write a reflection about your thoughts on wellness and wellbeing in children. 

What causes wellness?

Burns suggested that we are trained to think in terms how to treat things and we are always looking at the causes of things. He talked about this in relation to doctors and how they treat patients which I felt was a really good description to use.

From my reading it was suggested by Scottish Government (2009) that we need to be able to focus on promoting good mental wellbeing and try to monitor and reduce negative wellbeing. I think for many people would find this quite challenging an it would take quite a bit of time to change this mindset that we have been following for so long.

Burns continues to talk about the different wellbeing theories such

• Resilience – to achieve resilience we need to have support from secure family member, peers and community
• A sense of  meaning and purpose in some form
• The ability to flourish-  be optimistic, positive, form
• good relationships

Link between psychology and biology? Wellness will be not be improved unless we learn about the world around us and have a sense of control in the world around us.  This made me consider the way that we learn and the pedagogy that we use in school, for example experiential learning (Dewey) and how we promote this in school. This suggests that we are moving in the right direction however other factors will also contribute the inequalities.

I believe Burns is accurate when he says that we are living in a cycle and if young children are isolated or alienated at the early stages then this will continue unless something is done about it to break them out of the cycle.

What I got from this talk was that the relationships that we have play a key role in improving our wellness. If we have secure attachments at the beginning of our life, this is likely to continue and this will contribute to having a supporting family network. The relationships that we build as we grow up are part of our learning communities which enable us to stay connected. If we are connected to our peers and communities we are more likely to have confidence, higher self esteem ad be able to help others which then created a sense of meaning and purpose. If we are able to help and connect with people that feel excluded from society then this will help them get back into the community as they will begin to feel more accepted.

Scottish Government (2009) Towards a mentally flourishing Scotland Policy and Action Plan. Available at: http://www.gov.scot/resource/doc/271822/0081031.pdf (Accessed: 2 November 2015).