Wellbeing in Schools: Interview with Nadim Saad

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to CYP Now's Spotlight interview, which is accompanying this special report on mental health in schools, which will appear in the July edition of CYP Now. I'm delighted— sorry, my name is Darren Hayes, I'm the editor of CYP Now, and I'm delighted to be joined today by author, parenting coach, and Chief Executive Officer of the Happy Confident Company. Welcome, Nadim Saad.

Thank you very much, Darren. Thank you.

Nadim is one of the key people behind the 10 Minutes Matter campaign, which is calling on policymakers to build 10 minutes of mental wellbeing activities into the school day. We hear lots of statistics, Nadim, about rising prevalence levels of children and young people's mental health conditions. For example, 1 in 6 young people now report having a probable mental health condition up from 1 in 9 in just the last 5 or so years. So set against that context, what do you think are the key figures or statistics that illustrate the scale of the need in this country, and what do you think are the main contributing factors for this?

Thanks, Darren. Great question. I mean, you've already stated the biggest ones. It's actually people are Now talking about 1 in 5 children between the age of 5 and 14 who have a diagnosed mental health challenge every year. And what you just said, actually there's a 70% increase in the last 5 years. That's how bad it's getting. And the other super important stat is 70% of these mental health challenges are diagnosed too late. As in too late meaning they become a much bigger challenge than they could have been if they had been identified earlier, which is understandable. And that's why we really believe that early intervention is key. And so what we're seeing is the main reasons for all these challenges, COVID obviously contributed to this, but now post-COVID, there's actually also an acceleration of things, an acceleration of everything we're doing. And so everyone's kind of running around. And there's a lot of anxiety in the system that was created not just by COVID, but generally there is much more anxiety in the system, there's much more negativity. And we hear children as early as 6, 7, 8 talking about the crisis, you know, the cost of living crisis, about the war in Ukraine, about things about climate change, which is like, you know, things that we would talk about much later. They're now all confronted to this very early on and they feel absolutely no sense of agency on that. As you can imagine, they have no control over this, but it's their world. It's what's shaping their world. So it makes them very anxious. So children are generally more attuned, much more. They absorb everything. So they actually absorb energy and feelings much more than we do because we've got much more of a— we know how to shield ourselves from some things, or we completely cut off. Like, that was my case for many years until I did quite a lot of therapy to stop being cut off of my feelings and suppressing them. So it's actually, it's opening up and the children are opened up. They actually absorb a lot of this. So they absorb other people's anxiety. It's not just theirs. We tend to think that, oh, why is my child anxious? Well, because look at everyone around them, you know, there's a lot of anxiety. That's the main reason. But there are several other reasons. One of them is they're always on. They're, you know, it's very rare now that a child has a time to get bored or to not do anything and to just be contemplating. They'll just be always on because there's always a screen somewhere. Even if they don't have phones at a certain age, but there'll be an iPad lying around, or they'll be bored, therefore they'll ask for a game or to do something. And then the reaction of the parents is, oh, I don't have time. If it's the case, either they'll do something with them or I don't have time, and then here's an iPad or whatever. And even in school now, obviously devices are much more— and in schools, Everything is so crammed, there's hardly a part of, thankfully there's recess time, but usually everything is, you know, we talk about, we've got this campaign, the 10 Minutes Matter campaign, and it's about bringing 10 minutes a day of mental health in schools. And some schools manage to tell us, oh, but I don't know where to find 10 minutes. Okay, but what if the 10 minutes give you better behavior children?

They—

it gives you more adjusted children, self-regulation. So obviously, which leads to better behavior, gets teachers to have more time to teach because overall, the whole, you know, everyone's feeling better. They go, yeah, of course it's important, but we're not sure where to find it. So basically, we've managed to distill this in 10 minutes a day through different programs, and it's amazing. But even then, you know, schools and other settings tell us they don't have the time. And that's the problem we have is we're so full on all the time. And I'm now saying we because it works for adults too. There's a lot of research that shows that we've got a lot less attention as adults. It's mainly because of devices, but it's also because of notifications, because of this idea that we're always on and therefore we don't have time.

So the 24/7 nature of the information, the absorption of information and the fact it's constantly throwing information at us, but also the lack of time perhaps to also perhaps take stock of it and process it. Is that— are they essentially contributing factors then to the scenario?

Totally. So we lose the focus and then we're actually— we feel— so we got into a bit of anxiety because it's going so fast and because we've lost the focus and we realize we haven't done what we were supposed to do and things like that. And the anxiety just increases. We just don't know where the time's gone and that's what's creating. And then there's the unlimited number of choices that we have. And even for children, they've never had so many choices. Their brains is not, you know, is not developed enough. Their prefrontal cortex takes until the age of 24 to be developed. The prefrontal cortex, which is the rational part of the brain, the one that enables to take rational decisions to, you know, really know how to, for example, to take care of overwhelm, to reduce overwhelm or anxiety. Well, this is still in development. So if there's, you know, too many choices, too many things, just very difficult for the children to comprehend. And therefore that's why we really need to do something about it. And that's what the 10 Minutes Matter campaign is about.

So before we go on to find out more about the 10 Minutes Matter campaign, let's just think a little bit more about the, how that manifests, that scenario you just described kind of manifests itself schools who of course are kind of on the front line of this, and, you know, will be at school for probably the significant proportion of their day, most likely. And, um, you know, how do you think schools are— what's the current response from schools and policymakers, obviously kind of like set the overarching framework for that? How is that kind of like coping, do you think, with meeting the needs of of young people and mental health needs currently?

So I don't want to sound too negative, but there is so much more that needs to be done. It's a big challenge, isn't it? It is a big challenge. And the biggest challenge is because teachers and head teachers and all this, they're already overwhelmed. They already have way too much on there. They have too much admin, have too much stuff to do. They have too many choices to make.