Do you feel emotions strongly? Do you often feel misunderstood?

Do you seem to be aware of subtleties around you? Maybe you are the 15- 20% of people who are highly sensitive people… Wikipedia states “People with an increased sensitivity of the central nervous system and a deeper cognitive processing of physical, social and emotion stimuli have a personality trait termed highly sensitive person (HSP)”.…

How can parents help to build their child’s self esteem?

In many areas, young people’s lives are improving, yet there is evidence of a growing mental health crisis amongst teens. Rates of anxiety and depression have increased by 70% in the past 25 years. According to the Office of Official Statistics, the number of young suicides each year is greater than it has been for…

The minefield of parenting today

Parenting today seems, for many, to be loaded with pressure. As does ‘growing up’ today. Time is pressured, there is pressure to be a ‘successful’ parent, a pressure to ensure our children ‘succeed’,  a pressure to help out financially,  a pressure to accept very different values to our own about things such as alcohol, spending, drugs,…

Rates of depression and anxiety among teenagers have increased by 70% in the past 25 years. Why?

Whilst doing some of the research for a course I am running, I came across an article in the Independent stating the following statistic “rates of depression and anxiety among teenagers have increased by 70% in the past 25 years” Although I work with a good awareness of emotional health, I found this a disturbing…

Do you hope your children will make good decisions?

Most parents would agree that parenting entails a good amount of worry -which is possibly a slight understatement! As parents our main job is to keep our children safe -which has it’s challenging moments when the child is young and being supervised by us or a school teacher or grandparent or childminder or similar ….but…