What Emotional Health Really Means for Children (and Why It Matters)

What does emotional health mean to me?

In short - everything.

Emotional health is the foundation on which everything else is built upon and it’s intrinsically linked with our physical health too.

I grew up as a child confused and anxious. I look back at my first few years of life and I can’t remember any obvious loud emotions that overtook my young life, yes, I was naturally reserved around people I didn’t know and felt the end of things intensely - even the end of the day, but I can’t remember overwhelming feelings on a daily basis. I often spoke about “how I can sleep with my eyes open”, so there were perhaps early signs of me being hypervigilant, however.

I was happy though. I had amazing parents and extended family, and the memories of that time are vivid and treasured.

When we moved house and city when I was 7, I was naturally nervous, excited, but deeply sad to leave grandparents, cousins, and friends and to start from scratch. Anxiety raised its head quickly when I started my new school, a constant state of dread that I can still remember to this day. I was physically sick during school and had constant stomach aches. My poor mum would have to walk me screaming to school, I would kick as I was prised from her arms, I just wanted her so badly.

When I moved schools again, things settled somewhat and then came an event that shaped all of our worlds. The weeks that followed shaped me. My behaviour showed I was struggling, but it was the 80s. Kids were resilient. My absences from school were still higher than average. My friendships were inconsistent and often strained.

I simply did not understand how I felt and nobody was asking. The doctors didn’t get curious, even when I began to show worrying behaviours in my subconscious quest for connection and to be seen.

Instead of “What happened to you?” the question, quietly, systemically, was “Why are you like this?”

I struggled massively with friendships. I became dishonest to control a narrative and to try and find my place, adapting myself to be whoever I thought might give me an opening. This emotional confusion only spiralled as I grew.

My parents continued to be loving and understanding, but they had no textbook for navigating such a frightening time, they were living through a nightmare themselves. As hormones and grief mixed, I became someone nobody ever really knew. Not fully. Not even me.

Re-reading old journals now, I see the same words on the page year after year: sadness, unsure, pessimistic, no sense of belonging in the wider world outside of my family home. That vulnerability left me exposed and as a result of that vulnerability, I faced more trauma.

Fast forward to being an adult and through my role in early years in 2014, I attended my first emotional literacy training, I felt connected to my emotions for the first time. Something clicked. I sat there not only as an adult but as a child. Eyes wide.

This.

This was the stomach ache.

This was the obsessive thoughts.

This was the behaviour.

Emotional health.

It wasn’t my fault.

Emotional health isn’t one single thing. It isn’t a checklist or a destination you arrive at, it’s made up of lots of little things - how safe we feel, how understood we are, how our bodies are supported, how much space we have to process what life throws at us and it looks different for everyone.

There are shared elements of emotional health - connection, safety, regulation - but how we meet those needs varies. One thing I see over and over again is how little sensorial time we now have.

We now live in a world that is incredibly cognitive. Fast. Busy. Multi-tasking has become normal, we are often doing or listening, watching, three things at once, moving from one demand to the next, rarely pausing. Even everyday tasks that once held sensory input, counting money, handwriting forms, sorting papers, are disappearing. Now we sit, tapping at keyboards, eyes fixed on screens, bodies largely still while our minds race ahead.

Children feel this too. Their nervous systems are developing in a world that asks them to think, respond, perform, and adapt at a pace that doesn’t always leave room to feel or process.

And we need to be able to process in ways that work for us.

So many systems appear to have a sense of blame on the individual, the parent or carer, rather than looking at the situation and child as a whole - and all too often I still see shame-based behaviour management techniques used. Supporting emotional health does not mean being permissive it means being adaptable enough so that children and young people can access what they deserve. Without shame or feeling defective or broken.

Shame sticks. How do you let go of shame that has lived in your body for decades because there was no language, no curiosity, no one asking what instead of why? It doesn’t disappear. The attention-seeking, trouble making label lingers long after you’ve outgrown the child who carried it.

Over the years since my own experiences, I have made it my life’s work to explore emotional health proactively. To understand it, respect it, and share the research with children and adults in an accessible way that empowers and doesn’t judge. I want children growing up knowing they are not defective or broken for experiencing normal human emotions in response to life.

I want to advocate so adults can understand that emotional health is shaped not just by events, but by the support around them, the interactions we have and whether a child feels validated, soothed, and emotionally held.

I want schools and healthcare systems that can see behaviour for what it is: communication.

I desperately want children to have access to safe emotional and brave spaces and early intervention where they don’t have to hold feelings tight because it doesn’t feel safe to breathe them out.

There is so much still to be done and yet there is so much we can all do.

We can validate emotions without trying to fix them.

We can slow things down.

We can acknowledge how bodies feel in different environments.

We can create moments of sensory relief - movement, creativity, rhythm, stillness.

We can replace “Why did you do that?” with:

“What happened just before?”“

What did your body feel like?”

“What do you think you needed in that moment?”

At Bridge the Gap Child Mental Health CIC, we talk about children becoming emotion detectives, gently joining the dots between what they feel physically, the context they are in, the thoughts they have, and the actions they take. Emotional health grows when children know they can take that information to a safe adult to help piece it together.

It builds authentic emotional resilience and therefore emotional health.

We want children to learn that all emotions serve a purpose.

We want them to feel less frightened of their feelings, so they don’t do what I did - bottle everything up, become unwell mentally and physically, and struggle to navigate school, friendships, relationships, and life. The fear and dread I carried as a child has softened over time. I now hold deep love and compassion for the girl I was. However, the shame still sits underneath because healing is not linear. Therapy, empathy, and being truly seen do help us to feel worthy again though.

Becoming emotionally healthy as an adult changed everything.

Being supported to build emotional health as a child would have kept me so much safer and prevented so much harm.

We can do that now for the children in our own worlds.