Dajemy Dzieciom Siłę Foundation
"For many years I support as much as I can the Dajemy Dzieciom Siłę Foundation, with which I had my first contact 10 years ago at the moment of my child's diagnosis and starting a blog about teenage depression. I used their good practices for dealing with crisis situations then. Over the past years I could repay them in several projects, some of which I show below."
How I know the Foundation
I first came across the Dajemy Dzieciom Siłę Foundation ten years ago, when my child was diagnosed and I started a blog about teenage depression. I used their good practice for handling a crisis. Monika Horna-Cieślak worked with the Foundation as a lawyer; today she is the Children’s Rights Ombudsman.
In recent years I have been able to give something back in several projects. Two of them are below, and together with Sprawny Marketing I also ran charity auctions for the children’s and youth helpline.
Debate “How to help a child in mental crisis”
The Foundation organized the debate on April 20, 2023 at its Child Help Center in Warsaw, with an audience in the room and a live stream. It was moderated by Justyna Suchecka-Jadczak of TVN24.pl. With me on the panel were Tomek Bilicki, an educator and psychotherapist, and Agnieszka Duszyńska, who coordinates the counselors of the 116 111 helpline for children and young people. I spoke as a parent and an expert by experience.
What did I talk about? The red flags that we only saw in our own child in hindsight, in the hospital: studying more while grades drop, sleep problems, changes in eating, giving up hobbies, long sleeves on warm days. Each one alone means little; several at once are a signal to look for help. I also talked about the list of almost 400 support services for parents that I prepared in 2019 and that was published on the Patient Rights Ombudsman’s website, about the stigma parents face, and about a school psychologist usually having around 1,400 children to look after. I wrote up the conclusions and what I said in a longer blog post: How to Help a Child in a Mental Health Crisis: Lessons from the FDDS Debate. The full recording is below.
21st National Conference “Childhood without Violence”
The conference took place on 28–29 October 2024 at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. On the second day I was a panelist in the discussion “Mental crisis of a young person: from indifference to presence”, moderated by Katarzyna Talacha of FDDS, together with Marcelina Maciąg (Youth Kindness Revolution), Aga Święch (OFF School Foundation) and Rafał Ślusarczyk (FDDS). We talked about how to use the strength of peers, who are often the first to notice a friend in crisis, without making them responsible for reacting; whether adults recognise the signs of a crisis correctly; and how to talk about a teenager’s crisis with parents, young people and the media.
More about my talks, debates and media appearances on this subject: talks on children’s mental health and parenting.