Children’s Mental Health Week: Helping children explore their emotions through creativity

Supporting mental health and wellbeing is a core element of the care Demelza provides for families. We offer a huge range of creative therapies, including art therapy, music therapy, dance movement therapy and complementary therapies. In 2024 alone, we delivered…

857 creative arts therapies sessions

19 music therapy sessions delivered in a hospital setting

144 complementary therapies

94 creative arts groups

48 sensory sessions

and 637 counselling sessions!

“We encounter children experiencing loss in many ways – some children are experiencing the loss of a family member, or a very close friend. But it’s not just death. The children that we support, a lot of them have lost their cognitive skills, their health, their social circle, their school – there are many different forms of loss. The world can suddenly seem so unsafe and so unpredictable. As adults we know that, but so many of the children we support learn that far too young. Their world is just being established and then the rug is pulled out from under them.

“Because of this, anxiety is one of the biggest mental health issues we see. For siblings, they might go to bed and everything’s safe, and then in the morning, they wake up and mum’s gone, their sibling is gone, because they were taken to hospital in the night, so everything is just rocked. They don’t have the security that children need.

“When we support children in music therapy, one of the biggest tools we use is improvisation. So we might ask the child ‘If anger was a sound, what would that sound like? What instrument in here might be anger?’ Or we might do some songwriting. What I find interesting is often children will want to write a song, and even though they find it too hard to talk to anyone about their feelings, they put their deepest, darkest feelings into this song. We expect them to want to keep it private, but then they want to give it to their mum, dad, teacher, cousins, everyone! They want their feelings to be heard.

“Children often keep it quiet, especially with siblings, because they feel the need to be ‘good’. They see their parents struggling with their brother or sister, because they just need so much care, and they learn very early that they need to follow the rules, be quiet, say yes. So they learn to hide their feelings, they learn that strong feelings are bad. But here, strong feelings are encouraged, strong feelings are beautiful – they need to come out.

“Even as adults, to talk about our feelings is hard, and so to expect children to be able to do something that adults struggle with, it’s a lot. Especially if they’re young, they can’t find the words to describe or understand what’s actually happening within their thoughts and their feelings. But creative therapies don’t require words – often their thoughts and the pain they’re feeling doesn’t even have a word, even if they could think of it. But there is usually a sound for it. Or there’s something that can be created, marks made.

“Expressing that way doesn’t require them to do anything that doesn’t feel natural – children are made to play and create, they’re not made to think and talk. Creativity gives their brains a chance to stop.

“Parents and carers will often ask me what they can do to support their child’s mental health and, actually, they just need to concentrate on being a parent. These parents have been thrown into being a carer, they have to work and clean and cook and everything else - they can’t be their child’s therapist too. I’d always tell them to outsource that to us. That’s what we’re here for. They only need to hold space for being a parent - have that golden time with their children, just be a family together.

“Because life IS beautiful, and life is wonderful, and to support children to recognise that amid the difficulties, and help them build resilience, it’s vital, because otherwise these children might grow up to be very unhappy adults, and we don’t want that.

“It's an honour to be able to help children to explore their feelings. They are the ones having to do the hard work - they have to learn to trust us and that we’re safe, and it’s a privilege to be able to support them through these massive life challenges.”