Looking After Children's Mental Health with Mindscreen

I was approached by the lovely team at Mindscreen to ask if I would review their Mindscreen Experience Toolkit, which helps parents learn more about their children's mental health and how to support them. I was very excited about this prospect, as it's no secret that mental health is a massive issue for children and young people today and, as parents, it can be really worrying. There are more outside influences than ever before in our children's lives and most are not easily accessible to us. Technology constantly advances and throws up new potential threats with each new app or chatroom and the pace of life and demands on our kids can seem relentless, so I am right behind any tool that helps parents navigate those tricky teenage years. 

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The Mindscreen website is refreshingly easy to navigate and you can find your way around easily. There are four toolkits available, ranging from one child to a whole family, but it's recommended that you include yourself in the programme, to allow for comparison and to learn about yourself in relation to your child. There is a free self-esteem check for your child, which you can access without signing up for the programme and that will give you an insight into how the toolkit works as well as into your child's mental wellbeing.  It involves answering a range of questions on a scale of  'always' to 'never'. It really made me think about my son's everyday mood and behaviour and what it might be indicating. Once completed, a report is instantly generated explaining how your observations of your child translate in terms of their self-esteem and what action you can take. You also have the opportunity to ask someone else to take the test on behalf of your child, in order to ensure your answers are fair and unbiased. Sometimes when you are with someone all the time, your perception of them can differ from another person's, so this aspect can be helpful in securing an accurate result. This is my Self Esteem report. Turns out I'm pretty upbeat, but I know I answered in the negative for some of the questions, which explains why I still need work.

When you've selected your programme and received your log-in, you will find a welcome page which takes you through the process and how to get the most out of it. It offers a lot of helpful guidance and I felt more confident once I'd read it. Next, you can start the programme, which involves completing a profile for yourself, and asking your child to do the same. It's recommended that you complete a profile for yourself first and to do that you have to add yourself as a child, which wasn't immediately obvious, but I figured it out pretty quick. There are quite a few questions, each of which involves putting a list of statements in order of most likely to least likely, according to your preference. It is suggested that you go with your first instinct and don't dwell on the questions, but if you or your child are analytical thinkers, this may take some time. My son is analytical and he found it very hard to go with his first instinct and deliberated for quite a while on each question. After he had completed his profile, we ended the session, as we had answered a lot of questions and felt it was time to call it a day, before he got too bogged down with it. It is quite tricky to keep an unmotivated teen on task, but hopefully, he will find it easier to follow the more involved aspects of the programme as it moves on. Once completed, a profile will be generated with 15 pages of helpful, easy-to-read insights into how your child learns and how they can use this knowledge to facilitate success. There is also a Learning Improvement Graph and Personal Learning Style report, as shown below. All of these visual aids serve to provide a simple way of making sense of the data provided. 

As you can see, the presentation of the data is succinct and easy to understand, so you can give the profile to the child and they will easily be able to own it and make sense of it, giving them full control of the Mindscreen process and helping them fully embrace the experience. I think this is a very important aspect as if you want to explore and improve someone's self-esteem and confidence, it's always going to be more successful with them fully on board. Once all of this has been completed, you can access the lesson plan section via your account and see at a glance what comes next in the program. Each lesson plan has a parent/carer guide, as well as a learner diary for each child taking part, once again, giving the child control and responsibility for their learning journey. There is guidance all the way through so, although it can seem a little overwhelming at first, the steps are explained as you go along. The part that I'm most enjoying at the moment is that there is a lot of work to do, which I think represents good value for money. This certainly seems to be a very well-organised, comprehensive program and I'm looking forward to seeing where this adventure takes us. Join me in a couple of weeks' time for the next instalment of our Mindscreen Experience. 

Top photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Pinterest image by Sarah Dorweiler on Unsplash