This children's mental health week, let's work together to help children in social housing

The theme of this Children's Mental Health Week is 'Know Yourself, Grow Yourself', with the aim of equipping and empowering children and young people across the UK to embrace self-awareness and explore what it means to them, how to build resilience, grow and develop.

Nowhere is this more important than in social housing where families are often placed outside of where they lived previously, and many of whom do not have a support network in place, some unable to access nursery and social groups for young children, let alone early years education.

As a responsible private provider of affordable and social housing, Abode Living has invested in this support network to provide children with the chance to socialise, learn skills and develop learning from a young age. This is proven to help children build confidence and help them before they reach school age.

This mental health week we are calling on other providers of affordable housing to do the same. Putting a secure and high quality roof over people's heads is one thing but looking after tenants' wellbeing should be right up there and, with some of society's most vulnerable people residing in these communities, it's crucial we put in place a support system to help them live better lives in every aspect.

From educational workshops to providing libraries of books for young children, running art and craft sessions to organising play and sport programmes and, of course, wellbeing and mental health sessions for parents in order to support their children better, we know that we are giving families a better living experience and helping them to build resilience and other important skills that are essential to positive mental health.

Our family-oriented scheme in Crawley (Sutherland House) has a dedicated workshop cabin with a programme of well-attended family events and this has been a huge success. Over the last year we have planted gardens, had a whole animal farm visit the community and held numerous parties and entertainment. As a result, children and their parents have built strong relationships with the team on the ground, and each other - again, this is crucial to a strong and positive long-term community.

We are willing to work with any other provider of affordable housing to help share our ideas, lessons learned and work towards bettering people's lives on an ongoing basis, not just until they get placed in one of our homes. After all, the children of today are the people of tomorrow and they deserve not to be forgotten about, particularly this week - but ideally on an ongoing basis.