Yesterday children’s mental health was again in the news. We hear of primary school teachers speaking out about the lack of support for young children when it comes to their mental health – and child mental health support referrals being up almost 50% in the past 3 years for children under 11.

So I thought this week was the time to share with you just a taste of our mental health project for children aged between 6 and 11. As many of you Hubbers will know, it is a project very close to my heart and we have been working on it for the past 3 years – developing a 360 offering across film, TV, Apps, games and publishing, to empower younger children when it comes to their emotional wellbeing. All with the goal of truly transforming the landscape of children’s mental health globally by giving them tools to navigate the ups and downs of life. Much like the Happynesshub, our research and consultants have come from the fields of neuroscience, positive psychology, cognitive behavioural sciences and education. And, drum roll – it’s all through the medium of a diverse community of talking vlogging dogs!

The goal is for the children to have the conversations and be given advice through the films and TV, whilst their positive neural pathways will be developed in our Bow-Wowza immersive world app. Yes ta ta – it’s called BOW-WOWZA!

We will soon be sharing our taster film with you with our quirky and comedic canine vlogs, but I am keen to reach out to you all for support in any shape or form. You may know those in education who would be happy to test our pilot films with children in the UK or abroad, you could be an expert in some of the research fields or have experiences of working with children that could help us; you may be aware of those who would like to volunteer to support our journey, or dogs who would like to appear in the show (yes it’s real vlogging dogs – watch out Archie!). Or you may know those who would be willing to invest or give advice in this area – we’ve yet to work out our finance model but I am keen for it to be based upon a non-profit model and reflect the work of the wonderful Nipun Mehta and his Gandhi 3.0 model which I urge you all to find out about in his fabulous TED talk. Nipun suggests using models of modern day networks and many-to-many connections combined with values that Gandhi embodied – and how wonderful if Bow-Wowza could have this approach at its heart.

“Instead of having that one Gandhi, maybe we have many distributed, disinter-mediated Gandhi’s. What would that look like? What is that movement of compassion?  And perhaps this movement is not going to be funded, because maybe the big revolutionary thing is that it’ll only be powered by love.”

Nipun Mehta

So Hubbers, I’ll be sharing more with you as the weeks go by, but for now if you or anyone you know may be interested in supporting the Bow-Wowza journey do let us know.

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”

Nelson Mandela, Former President of South Africa