Let’s Get Ready – preparing our children to move out into the world again
Here is some information from the Gov.ie sit Let’s Get Ready on helping our children get ready for the move back to childcare, pre-school or primary school which you may find useful. The Coronavirus shutdown has had a huge impact on all of us, adults and children. Our children may need some support to feel ready to move back out into the world.
Let’s Get Ready
The lives of young children changed suddenly when early learning and childcare services and schools closed in March in response to the COVID-19 emergency. As children prepare to return to early learning and childcare services or make the move to pre-school and school for the first time, parents can be assured that there are a number of actions they can take at home to support these important transitions.
Here are the topics covered – just click the link for more information
- Ready to Reopen
- Ready for Pre-school
- Ready for School
- Ready to Play
- Ready for Everyone
- Ready with Resources
You can access the Let’s Get Ready website by clicking this link https://www.gov.ie/en/campaigns/1e8a3-lets-get-ready/
From Department of Children and Youth Affairs
Published at 5 June 2020
Last updated 3 July 2020
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Infant Mental Health Awareness Week runs from June 13th-19th.
This week provides an opportunity to focus attention on the wellbeing, social and emotional development of our babies and young children. It highlights the importance of early relationships and a relationship based approach to interventions with infants and families. As our understanding of IMH and its evidence base develops, so also does our knowledge of how to apply this knowledge and an ‘IMH lens’ to interactions with infants, parents and caregivers in health and social services.
What is infant mental health?
Infant Mental health (IMH) refers to the healthy social and emotional development of Infants starting at conception up to three years of age.
The first 1000 days of life are recognised as a critical period of opportunity to support infant mental health. Decades of research have shown that it is the quality of the early caregiver relationship that is a significant determinant of the infant’s healthy social and emotional development and in turn physical health, right up to adulthood.
The National Healthy Childhood Programme has embedded IMH as the foundation of the development of its resources and in the approach of the delivery of the universal child health service. This embedding of key messages can be seen in the My Child suite of books (www.mychild.ie/books) and also on www.MyChild.ie where key messages around bonding and relationship building have been embedded for the parent/caregiver.
In clinical practice the topic of IMH has been included for the first time in the National Standardised Child Health Record. To build on this, the National Healthy Childhood Programme have just completed a suite of three eLearning units which are now available on HSEland for healthcare practitioners / caregivers who are working with children and families.
Throughout the week you will see videos and key IMH messaging being promoted on the HSE MyChild social media pages ( Facebook / Instagram ). Keep an eye out in the National Newspapers for articles from our experts also. (IrishTimes article)
In addition The National Healthy Childhood Programme have developed a series of ten practical videos with HSE expert advice which are now available on YouTube and on the relevant pages on the www.mychild.ie website.
These videos (2-3 minutes each) are aimed at parents/guardians of children (0 – 3 years).
These new video resources are available here while lots more expert advice for every step of pregnancy, baby and toddler health can also be found at www.mychild.ie
There are a suite of posters available focusing on the promotion of IMH messaging to order from healthy.childhood@hse.ie
