Kids time - Targeted programme for young carers

Programme aims: Kidstime is a national programme delivered locally which seeks to enable children and young people who have parents with mental illness, or mental health challenges (which could also be impacting physical health or socio-economic factors of life) increase their confidence and coping skills and reduce feelings of distress and isolation, by providing a safe environment for them to share experiences, receive information, and explore myths about mental illness. The workshops also aim to help support and enhance the parenting capacities of parents with mental health challenges.

The overall purpose of Kidstime is to reduce the likelihood that children of parents with mental illnesses/challenges themselves will develop emotional difficulties later in life. Specifically, it’s aims are as follows: · To help children and young people benefit from understandable explanations of their parents’ mental illness and the parental behaviour which may be associated with this. · To address the children’s various fears and confusion, and lack of knowledge about mental illness and its treatment. · To help the parents who suffer from mental illness to find a medium within which the illness and its impact can be discussed between themselves and their children. · To help the parents to access or rediscover their pride, confidence, and competencies as parents. · To help the children and young people to feel free to engage in pleasurable, age-appropriate activities.

Target group: Kidstime workshops are open to the entire family—parents, carers, children, and young people. Children and young people who attend Kidstime are predominantly aged between 4 and 16 years, though sometimes both older and younger children and young people have been included.

Adult attendees are parents from the local area with mental health problems, ranging from severe and persistent psychotic disorders, such as Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, or personality disorders, through to chronic depression and anxiety disorders. A few have dual diagnosis or problems such as substance misuse in addition to their primary diagnosis.

Partners who do not suffer from mental illness may also attend. Typically, attendees represent the socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds of families living within the locality of workshop delivery.

Operational model: Key elements: · A strong focus on explanation of parental mental illness. · A setting that brings children and parents together around the topic of mental illness (rather than professionals engaging with them separately, as they may have previously experienced). In this joint context, both the influences of parental mental illness on children and the effect of the children’s responses on parents can be addressed. · A safe and welcoming environment that provides opportunities for developing relationships across families – both between children or adults of one family to the same age group in another, and cross-generational or inter-family relationships.