Let kids be kids
Beyond mental health access - prevention must go deeper.
The government’s commitment that, by 2029/30, every child in England will have access to mental health support is significant. More children are struggling, and early intervention matters.
But access alone is not prevention.
As someone who works with neurodivergent clients across the lifespan, including many late-diagnosed adults, I keep returning to the same question: what if we didn’t wait until children are in distress to support them? What if we changed the environments that shape them?
By the time a child reaches a CAMHS referral, they’ve often internalised the idea that something about them is wrong. What might it look like to centre difference, not as a problem to be fixed, but a clue to what needs to shift?
Rethinking prevention, full stop.
Let's state the obvious (I hope). Much of what we call “challenging behaviour” in schools is, in fact, a form of communication. When children feel overwhelmed, unseen, or unsafe, they express it, often in ways the system penalises.
Instead of simply responding to distress after the fact, we need to change the conditions that produce it. Prevention should be embedded in the everyday culture of learning, in the way we understand development, difference, and need.
Child led learning - not a choice!
We know from decades of developmental psychology that children learn best through curiosity, autonomy, and play. Peter Gray’s work on self-directed learning reminds us that children are biologically designed to learn through exploration, not compliance or coercion.¹
Play isn’t separate from learning. It’s how children practise social negotiation, emotional regulation, creativity, and motor planning, all core ingredients of mental wellbeing.
And yet, play continues to be squeezed out of classrooms in favour of outcomes, testing, and standardisation. As The Cambridge Primary Review² points out, children’s voices, rhythms, and rights are often overlooked in the name of performance.
This is a safeguarding issue, not just a pedagogical one.
The educational system still pathologises difference.
For neurodivergent children in particular, school is often the place where they first receive the message that their way of being is a problem. Many experience sensory overload, misunderstood behaviour, or masked distress — long before they’re offered meaningful support.
Most teacher training still offers minimal education on neurodiversity, trauma, or relational approaches. I spoke to a colleague studying to teach English and Drama this year. Behaviour policies dominate, relying on shame, exclusion, or rigid “consequences” that often escalate children’s distress rather than resolving it. It is not only sad but scary. I am scared, and I am not a kid anymore.
We need a fundamental shift from behaviour management to co-regulation.
From compliance to connection.
What happens when we don't make this shift?
The effects don’t disappear when children leave school.
Many of the neurodivergent adults I work with, especially those diagnosed later in life, describe chronic burnout, masking, and the deep exhaustion of having spent years trying to contort themselves to fit environments that were never designed for them.
Dr. Devon Price’s work on masking and autistic burnout³ underscores just how costly this misalignment can be. So many adults are now unlearning the survival strategies they developed in school, strategies that helped them “cope” but ultimately eroded their health, identity, and self-worth.
These same adults often say: “I didn’t need therapy. I needed someone to see me.”
What might change if we did that earlier?
Cultural, collective and... slow - prevention is hard work.
Real prevention happens in the micro-moments:
A teacher choosing curiosity over consequence
A timetable that allows rest, not just rigour
A classroom where movement, sensory breaks, and quiet are not punishable but expected
It happens when we build schools around the full range of human needs, not just performance metrics.
Yes, we need access to services. But we also need access to understanding. To play. To rest. To relationships that make space for the whole child, not just their test results.
Let’s invest in training educators in neurodiversity. Let’s honour the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child⁴, which recognises the right to play as fundamental to development. Let’s listen to what late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults are telling us, too, that the support they needed wasn’t clinical. It was cultural.
If we want to reduce mental health crises in young people, we must go further upstream.
The children we’re worried about are already showing us where the system is leaking.
Let’s not wait for referrals to take them seriously.
References
Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn. Basic Books.
Cambridge Primary Review Trust (2010). Children, Their World, Their Education. Final Report.
Price, D. (2022). Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity. Harmony.
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – Article 31: Right to rest, leisure and play.
