Mrs Shelton, our Family Support Worker, is available in school to help children emotionally.  She also supports parents around issues such as attendance, behaviour, safeguarding and accessing help through the Early Help process.

Healthy Minds Workshops for Parents

As a result of the changes to everyday life due to the Covid 19 pandemic, we recognise that some children may be experiencing higher anxiety levels than usual and parents may welcome some help to support their children emotionally in these unusual times.

With this in mind, Healthy Minds, Lincolnshire,  have introduced the following free online workshops for parents to support with children’s anxiety, worries and anger:

• Managing worries and anxiety workshop
• Managing angry feelings workshop
• Parents supporting children with anxiety and additional needs workshop
• Survival guide to change workshop
• Staying emotionally healthy
• Building positive self-esteem

The workshops can be found at https://www.lpft.nhs.uk/young-people/online-workshops

Free online courses for all parents, carers and grandparents

Nurturing emotional health and wellbeing from bump to 19+ years

Lincolnshire County Council has partnered with the Solihull Approach to offer free access to expertly designed online courses for parents and carers living in Lincolnshire.

Sign up for free to understand your child’s feelings, as well as your own, as you go through life as a family.

Learn to understand the changes in your child’s development and how to support them, whilst also strengthening your relationship.

Enter our exclusive Lincolnshire Access Code “WE_CAN” at inourplace.co.uk/lincolnshire/ for lifetime access to the courses so you can complete in your own time.

NHS Top Tips for supporting your child’s mental health:

https://www.nhs.uk/oneyou/every-mind-matters/childrens-mental-health/

Family Line

Family Line is a free helpline, befriending and counselling service for parents and carers. 

The service is open Monday to Friday from 9am to 9pm and is there to provide a listening ear, answer particular parenting questions or help with guidance around more complex family issues. They can also provide longer-term support through regular sessions with Befrienders and Counsellors. All support takes place via telephone, text message, web chat or email and is free.

Further details can be found on the Family Action website: https://www.family-action.org.uk/what-we-do/children-families/familyline/

Family Services Directory

The Lincolnshire Family Services Directory (lincsfamilydirectory.org.uk) is an online guide to services and information for parents.

Place To Be

Parenting Smart - Parenting advice from child mental health experts 

https://parentingsmart.place2be.org.uk/

WeHeartCBT

WeHeartCBT is a collection of resources for children and young people who are struggling with anxiety and/or low mood, based on a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approach. There are resources for parents to support your child’s anxiety and/or low mood.

IHeartCBT - Parents, Mental Health Resources (weheartcbt.com)

Sleep worries for children

Some parents have concerns about their children’s sleep, and children may be having difficulty sleeping for different reasons.  The links below offer advice and support if you are worried about your child’s sleeping. 

The Sleep Charity – for support with children’s sleep problems; establishing bedtime routines; relaxation and creating a calm bedroom environment to aid sleep. 

 Night Terrors and Nightmares - NHS advice for children who experience nightmares or night terrors.

Meet Ollee - your helpful digital friend

Ollee  is a digital friend for children aged 8-11, created by Parent Zone and funded by BBC Children in Need’s A Million & Me initiative, which aims to make a difference to children’s emotional wellbeing.

It’s designed to help children reflect on how they feel and to process their experiences with the support and help of their parents and carers – and it does this by offering them advice about a range of subjects: school, family, friends, their body, the internet and the world.

For each of these subjects, children can choose an emotion that matches how they feel about it: happy, angry, sad, confused, frustrated, stressed or worried.

Next, they can choose from a list of topics – for instance, a child who was worried about school might be able to select ‘I haven’t done my homework’ as the cause of their worry. Finally, they’ll see a page of advice about the topic, presented in child-friendly bite-sized chunks they can read then or save for later.

Childhood Bereavement

The Childhood Bereavement Centre is available to help parents to support children who have been bereaved.

They are currently running two free courses:

• To enable parents/carers and family members to increase their understanding of childhood grief and learn helpful suggestions/practical ideas to better support their children and themselves when someone important to them has died.

• To increase the knowledge of parents/carers to develop practical and creative skills to help their child cope with difficult feelings/memories and create calm to help support self-regulation.

You can book these free courses at Training for Parents & Carers | Children's Bereavement Centre (childrensbereavementcentre.co.uk).

Reducing Parental Conflict

We know arguments are a part of everyday life, but certain times, circumstances and issues that aren’t resolved can lead us as parents/caregivers to get stuck in a cycle of unresolved arguments, causing us to be angry, to place blame, to ignore and be disrespectful towards each other and in front of our children. 

For those who may be experiencing relationship difficulties, this can and does impact on our child/children’s wellbeing and behaviour, which then in turns affects family life and those relationships.

 There are some really great resources available to families for free from One Plus One and information can be found at Reducing parental conflict – Advice for families - Lincolnshire County Council 

 You will need to sign up for an account with OnePlusOne before you can access the resources, but this does not get reported back to the local authority, so it is confidential.

The resources available are:

• Getting it Right for Children- Separated and divorced parents
• Arguing Better- Parents living and together in home
• Me you and Baby too – New expectant parents/or new baby in home
• Debt- impact of cost of living, debts, addictions etc how these impacts on relationships and children