Free Event for Children’s Mental Health Week: Join Dan Siegel, Peter Fonagy and Anthea Benjamin to Talk Trust, Resilience and Growing Together

It is often said that children are our greatest teachers – which may ring true whether we are learning how to be parents or caregivers, training to be therapists or educators, or simply working out how to live meaningfully. 

When children are thriving, they remind us of what is important in life.  

When they are struggling, they reveal something about the nature of our home, school or wider social environments, and guide us towards helpful change. 

Sadly, we know that increasing numbers of children and young people are struggling. In the UK, one in six are now likely to be living with a mental health problem, and three quarters are not getting the help they need.  

We may survey the damage wrought by the pandemic and feel daunted rather than driven by the task of providing a better future for the next generation. We might size up the social inequalities that the coronavirus crisis has uncovered and compounded, and wonder where on earth to start.  

Yet we are already in a position to make a profound difference to the lives of children and young people – today.   

To help us learn how, on Friday 11th February PESI UK will be hosting a special free online conference dedicated to understanding and supporting the developing mind.    

Taking place during Children’s Mental Health Week, and in partnership with the Anna Freud Centre, this live-streamed event will feature presentations and interactive Q&As with Anthea Benjamin, Dr Anoushka Khan, Dr Roslyn Law, Dr Dan Siegel and Professor Peter Fonagy, and focus on practical interventions that we can all implement now. 

Drawing on key multi-disciplinary developments from the fields of psychology and neurobiology, The Developing Mind: Building Trust, Growth and Resilience Together will also provide a compassionate clinical take on the theme of Children’s Mental Health Week 2022: ‘Growing Together’. 

From attachment theory, and Peter Fonagy’s more recent work around mentalization, we know that it is stable, trusted presence that provides the ground for developmental growth – from a child’s sense of identity and capacity to self-soothe, through to their social awareness and situational adaptivity. The professor of contemporary psychoanalysis and Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre will be talking trust, empathy, and why understanding our own and each other’s mental states is a vital foundational skill for us to foster in young people. 

Growing together also means using age-appropriate strategies. Integrating knowledge of how different parts of a child’s brain develop at different speeds, interpersonal neurobiologist Dr Dan Siegel will share interventions for building resilience, balance and connection as we discuss ‘the whole brain child’.  

We also grow as adults – perhaps especially as clinicians and as a therapy profession – when we meet children where they truly are. Arts therapist and adolescent counsellor Anthea Benjamin’s presentation will focus on working outside the frame with children from marginalised communities, and the precious opportunities this provides for us to expand the sometimes elitist parameters of our practice. 

Finally, the impact of trauma on the developing mind will be on the agenda as the conference concludes with a conversation between Dr Anousha Khan, a specialist in the emotional needs of care leavers and child development research, and Dr Roslyn Law, leading authority on the use of Interpersonal Therapy (IPT) with children and young people.  

Children’s psychological and emotional health is rooted in relationship, giving us adults great responsibility, and also great power. Whether you work with children professionally, or are looking to better support the young people in your life, we hope this event will resource and inspire you.  

When we learn together, we grow together – developing our own capacity to help children cope with today’s considerable challenges and build collective hope for tomorrow.