What does The Children's Centre do?

This article was written by Janet Bailey, Head of Practice at The Children’s Centre for Business 365 Magazine.

The list is in fact endless - but our main stay, our bread and butter with our children and young people is Therapeutic Intervention.

Therapeutic intervention? What the heck does that mean I hear you say? Well I am here to tell you what it means, what it does and what it can achieve.

For us, therapeutic intervention is the vehicle we use to support our children and young people to achieve their goals. It isn't a pill or a one off session, it is a collection of activities designed to enable a child or young person to speak, to learn about themselves. To learn about their own emotions and the emotions of others. To begin to understand consequences and responsibility. But most importantly to really talk, to really say what they feel. Name the emotions they feel and then learn how to self-manage emotions and behaviours. We at The Children's Centre use many different types of therapeutic activities when working with our children and families.

Our highly trained practitioners work on either a one to one or group basis with children and young people who are experiencing low self-esteem, difficulty in managing their emotions, high levels of anxiety, low level depression. They may have difficulty in managing a school setting or understanding the emotions of others. They may be adversely affected by domestic abuse, long term illness, death, divorce, depression, alcohol or drug misuse by a parent, carer, sibling or family member and of course, Covid 19 and all its associated fears; illness and long term effects on everyone and everything.

We utilise our magnificent 15 acre site to undertake our work. From outdoor experiences in our conservation area, growing tunnels, fruit and vegetable patch and orchard; to our specially adapted kitchens, for cooking and creating food masterpieces of success. We are able to use produce skilfully nurtured, grown and harvested on site by our young people. We also work in our community, using our many glens, coves and beaches, as well as our rocks and rolling hills and spying wonderful sea life in our Manx waters. Interacting with nature has been found to reduce stress in young people and has been widely recognised as a factor in boosting self-esteem and sense of identity.

We offer challenge by choice with the draw of success and achievement, we offer the opportunity to stretch and grow in emotional, cognitive and physical development.

POSITIVE INTERACTIONS POSITIVE ROLE MODELS POSITIVE OUTCOMES

We currently outsource Play Therapy for our children suffering from significant distress. This is an expensive service but desperately needed for our younger children between 3 and 10 years old. It is our hope that shortly we will be able to launch our brand new craft and ceramics space with the implementation of an art therapy service - watch this space!

We also support the parents of the children we work with, offering a whole family approach where possible. This can be as simple as a telephone catch up every couple of week, to a full support package, of weekly sessions including some talk time, support with budgeting, shopping, transport to appointments, financial assistance, home decluttering and setting rules and boundaries

A timetable of evidence based Parenting Programmes is offered. run by trained practitioners, The Solihull Approach, Understanding Your Child, Triple P Parenting; for Children and Teens, Parenting Teens and Divorce and separation - How it Affects Your Child to workshops such as potty training and tackling tantrums.

As our children grow, we watch them week by week, build their confidence and self-esteem, begin to talk, to express, to manage. Return to school, return to clubs and social activities and make friends. Moving from unhappy to happy, from I can't too I can, from no way to Okay - this is the power of the work we do.

We are currently supporting 74 families with our bespoke one to one service provision. From September will be supporting, on a weekly basis, 10 individual groups of children of all ages and abilities.

Our work is vital, it's for those children and families who aren't "bad enough", but need help and support now. We need your support, funding this work is our biggest challenge, we need you, your business to champion our charity. Many of you already do, for those of you who don't come up and see us, let us tell and show you the differences we make.

The children we work with today, are the ones who will be looking after our future, let's do all we can for them and us now.