Art-based activities can develop resilience and self-esteem, enabling children in need to cope better with ongoing stress and loss. Arts Activities for Children and Young People in Need offers interventions and exercises drawn from practice and research, for practitioners to use as a basis for their own arts-based groups or one-to-one sessions. Holistic arts activities facilitate a spiritually sensitive approach. Mindfulness-based exercises underpin the approach, and include guided meditations in which a group imagines that they are clouds, or draw feelings and emotions while listening to music, to encourage awareness of the senses. The activities help the group to relax and become more self-aware, encourage an exploration of feelings, values and understanding and are beneficial for children not ready to embrace traditional therapies or counselling. This book is accessible and suitable for helping, health and education practitioners and students from a variety of disciplines, such as social work, psychology and counselling.

This book offers an abundance of fun games that help children to confront personal problems in a light-hearted yet meaningful way. These are games with a difference, as they must be constructed before they can be played. The creation aspect involves collaboration within a team, and instils an empowering sense of ownership in the creators.

This guidebook has been created to be used alongside the storybook, The Girl Who Lost the Light in Her Eyes. Using a relational approach, it explores the themes of the story and offers guidance to the adult as they use expressive arts to give the child or young person a creative outlet for their emotions. The gentle guidance offered makes this an ideal tool for non-specialists working with children experiencing loss or bereavement. It guides the adult to respond appropriately and sensitively to the grief of the child, whilst helping them journey through the grieving process. This book must be used alongside the illustrated storybook, The Girl Who Lost the Light in Her Eyes. Both books are available to purchase as a set, Supporting Children and Young People Who Experience Loss. The full set includes: • The Girl Who Lost the Light in Her Eyes, a colourfully illustrated and sensitively written storybook, designed to encourage conversation and support emotional literacy. • Using the Expressive Arts with Children and Young People Who Experience Loss, a supporting guidebook that explores a relational approach and promotes creative expression as a way through loss or bereavement. Perfectly crafted to spark communication around a difficult topic, this is an invaluable tool for practitioners, educators, parents, and anybody else looking to support a child or young person through loss or bereavement.

This book provides a clear framework for conducting participatory research with children and young people supported with practical examples from international research studies. Our aim is to encourage more participatory research with children and young people on all matters that affect their lives. This book illustrates innovative ways of being participatory and sheds new light on involvement strategies that play to children’s and young people’s competencies. Participatory research is based on the recognition of children and young people as active contributors rather than objects of research. Participatory researchers support and value the voices of children and young people in all matters that concern them. Core to participatory research practice is a strengths-based approach that aims to promote the active engagement of children and young people in all stages of research, from inception to implementation and beyond. Engagement of children and young people requires the use of creative, participatory methods, tools and involvement strategies to reveal children’s competencies. This book shares knowledge about creative participatory techniques that can enable and promote children’s ways of expressing their views and experiences. The book provides guidance on appropriate techniques that reduce the power differential in the adult-child relationship and which optimise children’s abilities to participate in research. This book is targeted at researchers, academics, and practitioners who need guidance on what tools are available, how the tools can be used, advantages and challenges, and how best to involve children in all stages of a research project. It will provide several examples of how children can have an active participatory role in research. There is increasing interest in involving children as co-researchers but little guidance on how this can be done. This book fills a this gap by addressing all of these issues and by providing worked examples from leading researchers and academics.

This book investigates how arts-based research methods can positively influence people’s resilience and well-being, particularly in constraining environments. Using examples from arts-based research methods in different contexts and from across the globe, the book brings together a diverse range of perspectives to understand how both resilience and well-being can be supported in a world that is rarely stress free. Collectively they demonstrate how arts-based research methods can: provide agency through the foregrounding of participants’ voices; afford transformational learning opportunities; create opportunities for relationship building; support creativity and new ways of thinking; generate aspirations and hope; encourage forms of communication that expose ideas, emotions and feelings that previously might not have been known or known how to be expressed; and enhance reflection and reflexivity. The authors explore how art-based practices, such as clowning, collage, dramatisation, drawing, painting, role-play and sculpting, can be used to support the resilience and well-being of individuals and groups across the lifespan, and theorize how arts-based research methods can positively contribute to participants’ positive self-esteem, self-image and ability to cope with challenges and new circumstances. Academics, professional learning facilitators, higher education students, and anyone interested in resilience and well-being in the health and education sectors will find this an interesting and engaging text.

"Art-based activities can help to develop resilience and self-esteem, enabling children in need to cope better with ongoing stress, trauma and loss. Arts Activities for Children and Young People in Need offers interventions and exercises drawn from practice and research for practitioners to use as a basis for their own arts-based groups or one-to-one sessions. This accessible book will be of great use to health and education practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines who are involved in working with troubled children and young people."--BOOK JACKET.

Highly Commended in the 2005 BMA Medical Book Competition The Children's National Service Framework sets standards for children's and young people's services, outlining what support should be available to children and their parents in managing and preventing a wide range of conditions and problems. This book is a companion to the Children's (NSF), enabling those that work within the NHS, social care and education to the put the NSF into practice in primary care. Contributions throughout from key professionals who were involved in the evolution of the framework help by providing guidance and expertise from the knowledge and background material gained throughout its development. The authors expand on the vision, themes and goals published within the NSF and make recommendations for the ways that best practice can be implemented, particularly for children's healthcare throughout the UK and anywhere in the Western world. General practitioners, child health specialists, community nurses and anyone with an interest in or responsibility for the care of children in primary care and the interface with social care and education, will find this book invaluable reading.