This Mental Health Awareness Week, the theme is Take Action. Meaningful action starts with understanding what we may be missing. Forces children often grow up navigating mobility, separation, uncertainty, and repeated change. While many are described as “resilient”, this can sometimes mask the anxiety they carry quietly every day. Moreover, what can we do as professionals, educators, and/or parents to ensure that children and young people are supported during these changes?
In the Ruby Boots Project, the conversation we have often is around anxiety. According to the National Health Service, anxiety can be described as “a feeling of fear or unease – and it’s something everyone experiences at times. Feeling anxious is a perfectly natural reaction to some situations.”
What is important to define is the difference between anxiety and an anxiety disorder. While anxiety itself is a normal human emotion that most people experience, especially during stress, uncertainty, or pressure, an anxiety disorder is when that anxiety becomes persistent, overwhelming, or starts interfering with daily life, relationships, sleep, concentration, or wellbeing. The difference is not whether someone feels anxious, but how much it affects their ability to live comfortably and consistently.
To effectively support children and young people’s anxiety, it is important to take action and challenge our own beliefs. Research in the UK repeatedly shows that stigma still exists — even among professionals trained to understand mental health, which should make all of us more reflective. The real question is not whether anxiety is “reasonable enough” to deserve compassion but whether we are willing to respond to distress with curiosity.
Anxiety is often spoken about as though it only exists in moments of visible crisis. But for many children, young people, and adults, it can appear in quieter and more socially accepted ways — overpreparing, difficulty switching off, needing certainty, taking on too much responsibility, or thinking carefully through every possible outcome. Perhaps part of reducing stigma is recognising that anxiety is not always weakness or dysfunction. In many cases, it exists alongside competence, caring, reliability, high levels of responsibility, and hidden through ‘resilience’.
Anxiety is not always something to “fix”. Sometimes it is the mind and body trying to stay prepared, alert, and safe.
Forces Children Scotland’s resource, Understanding Anxiety as Your Bodyguard, helps reframe anxiety in a compassionate and accessible way. For children living with repeated change and uncertainty, that “bodyguard” can become overactive — always scanning for what might happen next.
It always helps to take a moment and reflect. Collectively, are we:
Taking action does not always require big interventions. Sometimes it starts with listening differently. Here are other small ways you can reframe the conversation about mental health:
This Mental Health Awareness Week, taking action means looking beyond assumptions.
It means recognising that anxiety in Forces children is often rooted in adaptation, uncertainty, and lived experience, not weakness.
When professionals challenge stigma, listen with curiosity, and respond with understanding, Forces children are more likely to feel seen, supported, and safe enough to ask for help. Together, let’s take action.