A core strength of youth work lies in its ability to create safe, supportive environments where young people can express themselves freely and feel accepted, included, and seen. Youth work plays a vital role in enabling young people to explore their identity and develop a deeper understanding of themselves, key foundations for positive mental wellbeing.
Our new resource Supporting Young People with Anxiety: A Guide for Youth Workers aims to continue to build on that capacity of youth workers with a lens to better understand anxiety and how it may present in young people. It also offers practical approaches and tools to support meaningful conversations, helping young people to recognise, explore, and articulate their emotions.
To support young people who are experiencing anxiety, we must first be able to help the young people recognise, understand, and express their emotions. However, in a world where it is becoming increasingly challenging to question ideas and differing viewpoints, it can feel more difficult to engage young people in open, constructive conversations about their feelings, often out of fear of saying the wrong thing or unintentionally shutting those conversations down.
As part of a wider suite of mental health promotion supports provided by the National Youth Health Programme, this resource offers a timely and valuable starting point for those seeking to support the mental wellbeing of young people, now and into the future
