As part of Atlas Group’s month-long initiative to promote mental health awareness, the company organised an information session for its employees who are also parents which focused on building emotional resilience and regulation in children. 

This interactive session, presented by Angela Abela, covered a range of emotions present in children of all ages. She also explained how parents can tackle and regulate these emotions in their children, as well as outlined emotional issues parents face daily as well as the possible solutions. Abela invited participants to share their own experiences with their own children and ask questions.

Research shows that children, like adults, are capable of working through challenges and coping with life’s challenges and issues. Through resilience, which they learn to develop as they grow, children can bounce back from various issues in life like stress, adversity, failure, challenges, bullying and cyberbullying, and even traumas. Resilience helps kids navigate through such situations and aids them in taking healthy risks.

Abela is a professor at the Department of Family Studies at the University of Malta, a clinical psychologist, a UKCP registered family therapist and a supervisor. Currently she chairs the National Centre for Family Research within the President’s Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society. She also serves as a consultant in the area of children and families for government and the Standing Committees on Social Affairs and on Family Affairs in Parliament. 

This session formed part of a month-long initiative to promote mental health awareness at Atlas. The initiatives included Atlas Healthcare’s focus on well-being during the recent FHRD conference, as well as a dress-down October to promote mental health awareness coupled with mental health badges which employees sported during the month.