BOW VALLEY– Summer is drawing to a close and children and adolescents alike are gearing up for the beginning of another school year. But during this period of transition, youths can experience a range of emotions from excitement to anxiety.
With the school year right around the corner, managing mental health is just as important for academic success as studying.
“There’s always anxiety that presents itself so parents play a big role in helping give their kids some calm. Parents need to be calm if they want their kids to be calm,” said Right From the Start project manager Mary Weighell.
While those feelings are normal, especially at the beginning of a new school year, it can sometimes be difficult for youth to manage.
Started back in 2005, the program Right from the Start focused on supporting education surrounding mental health in the classroom.
“We support social emotional programming. We may talk about personal boundaries, about self-esteem, we’ll talk about friendships and social skills and do a lot of skill building and practicing with kids as well,” Weighell said.
While education is an important piece of the conversation, Weighell added that helping youth develop the strategies and skill set to address their own mental health is equally important.
Through coaching, mentorships, role models and even providing opportunities to practice those strategies, Right from the Start supports mental health initiatives.
Not only does the program provide support systems for children and youth, but also families and school faculty members.
“Essentially we are supporting education, prevention, promotion and de-stigmatization of mental health. We work with teachers and staff within the school, administration as well as students and their families around mental health and around prevention and promotion. A lot of the work that we do is universal which means we provide information for everybody,” Weighell said.
While Right From the Start is focused on teaching children and families how to manage mental health, You Feel I Feel concentrates on teaching social emotional intelligence and empathy with children.
You Feel I Feel is a program where once a month, a caregiver and their infant will visit Kindergarten and Grade 1 classrooms.
Every month is centered around an emotion such as sadness, courage, fear or joy and students are asked to find the non-verbal ways in which babies communicate their emotions. The students are then asked to point out how the caregiver responds to those non-verbal cues.
At the end of the sessions, children are asked to think back at times when they felt that way.
“So when we build empathy for other young people and we can see other people and ourselves as relating similarly and we build empathy and understanding of other people around us,” said family and community worker with the Town of Canmore Laura Wellmann.
According to Wellmann, teaching social emotional intelligence to children at a young age can help them later in their adult years with coping with emotions and also managing mental health.
“If we can start now where our kids are able to identify their feelings or able to identify feelings in others and then have a little bit of a toolbox to move through those feelings and to recognize that it’s healthy,” Wellmann said.
Since You Feel I Feel relies on the help of volunteers, the program is looking for caregivers and infants who are interested in participating in the program. For more information on how to volunteer with You Feel I Feel, contact Laura Wellmann at [email protected].
