Six ways to build partnerships with children

Engaging children as partners in practice helps ensure children’s voices, experiences and knowledge are valued in practice settings. Collaboration between practitioners and children lays a solid foundation for responding to child mental health concerns.

But how can you meaningfully partner with children in your own practice? We’ve outlined six ways you can build partnerships with children and their families.

1. Valuing children as partners

Understanding the benefits of working collaboratively with children and their families provides a strong foundation for building partnerships. This involves recognising children as the experts in their own lives and valuing their contributions to your work together.

2. Paving the way with parents

Establishing a sense of collaboration with parents paves the way for engaging effectively with children. You can do this by having conversations with parents that explore the hopes and concerns they have for their child’s mental health and wellbeing.

3. Considering how to begin

Creating environments that are safe and comfortable for children is an important step in beginning your partnership. This involves thinking about who and what is in the room, talking openly about your work together, and encouraging children to be active participants.

4. Developing rich pictures

Partnering with children involves developing rich pictures of their strengths, skills, know-how and values. You can help children to recognise and value these attributes and capabilities as they share with you. This can provide a foundation to help reduce the impact of problems on children’s mental health and wellbeing.

5. Finding ways to shrink problems

It is important to understand children’s perspective on the problems they are facing. By inviting children to describe these problems and how they affect their lives, you can work together to explore ways to limit their impact.

6. Helping ideas to stick

Working together, you can help children to come up with ideas for responding to the problems in their lives. Ideas can come from recognising the skills, capabilities and interests that children could use (or are already using) to respond to these problems. Identifying the ideas that have worked and making sure they ‘stick’ can help equip children when facing these problems in future.

What next?

You can find out more about building partnerships in Engaging children, our free online learning pathway. Across seven short courses, we dig into these different ways of working with children in practice settings, as well as addressing creative ways to conclude this work. Each course includes practitioner interviews, practice demonstration videos and ideas to incorporate into your practice.

Check out the learning pathway to start engaging children as partners today.