Review: What do we mean by social-emotional Learning through Play

We began this week thinking about what makes you and the children in your life feel emotionally and psychologically well. The rest of the week was designed to help you understand what contributes to mental health and psychosocial wellbeing.

Mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) is any support that people receive to protect and promote wellbeing or respond to their mental health and psychosocial needs. Mental health is comprised of psychological health and social engagement. The term psychosocial (psychological and social) is used to describe this interconnection.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is one aspect of building foundations for mental health and psychosocial wellbeing. It is the development of skills, competencies, values, and beliefs that are essential to succeeding in life, across the cognitive, social, and emotional domains.

We talked about the “see-saw” of adversity and resilience. The goal is to stay balanced between the two, so always responding to risk factors or adversity with promotive & protective factors. Resilience is overcoming adversity, relying on the full social world of support – the individual competencies and skills, close connections and family, local community, and broader systems like policies and government.

We learned different promotion and response strategies. Promotion strategies aim to build wellbeing, and response strategies occur in the face of adversity. We tried:

• Child-friendly Mindfulness
• Social Support Mapping
• Identification of Distress
• Referral to MHPSS Services

All of this knowledge and the skills you built this week set you up to learn about how to support the wellbeing of yourself and children in your life through social-emotional learning and play!