The Perfect Combo: Journals, Planners, & Mental Health 👌🏽🤩

Creating the adult journals & planners was easy work, especially since I knew exactly what I wanted to put in them & how they work for me. They keep my life in order, so making self-care tools for adults was light work. Now creating for kids was a bit of a challenge, but between life & career experience, the Intentional Youth Products were born, the perfect combo between journals, planners, & mental health.🤰🏽Prayerfully, they’ll make a positive impact on our youth, but let me take you through the tedious process…

The Perfect Combo Main Ingredient: Mental Health ⚕️

Mental health is my life! My regular readers already know what the deal is: it’s an unending love affair. Call me a polygamist if need be, but it is what it is, & both of my “spouses” are ok with the arrangement. Mental health just knows husbae comes first. 🥇

     My first “marriage” started in 2003, & I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I was fresh out of college with an infant & had bills to pay. 💰 If I knew then what know now, I would’ve warned those parents that they were putting a diagnosis on their kids to get free afterschool care. #FRAUD #SCAM #THIEF We had neighborhoods of kids that would come, we’d give them 30-45 minutes of group therapy, & the other 2.5 were spent having snack, doing homework, & playing outside. Nothing that needed a mental health diagnosis.

     Don’t get me wrong, a lot of those kids had ADHD & ODD for sure, but this was back when everybody was opening MH companies for the Medicaid dollars. 🤑There was money to blow for sure. But when I went to my second company, I got the real welcome to behavioral health! 😈

    The first time I ever had to restrain anyone, it was an 8 year old girl. I’ll never forget her name, nor the looooooong incident report you had to fill out after every restraint, or her threatening to cut my head off with her dad’s chain saw. 🔪 It was definitely eye-opening when it came to respecting how real mental health is. Let me tell you, restraining someone is no joke! I’d literally shower, eat, & be in bed by 6:30 after a restraint. 🛌 It was a lot!

     The next one was a 4 year old who’d act up during nap time every day. He’d cuss me slap out, & I had to try not to laugh at this little person who was just over waist-high going IN on me! Then he’d try to run in the road since I had to take him out so he wouldn’t disturb the other kids. 🏃🏾

     Unfortunately, mental health wasn’t really taken seriously back then in schools, so there were no interventions to teach teachers when they had kids with mental health challenges in their classes. Many of them just saw the kids as being bad & punish them, but by seeing so much more working in the field, I knew it was much deeper than that. 

     I separated from mental health for about 18 months when Hurricane Katrina happened. I was burnt out but also needed to get out of a deep financial hole. 🕳️ So we had an amicable breakup, & I went to Florida temporarily to work insurance catastrophe claims from the devastation Katrina left. The money was great, but it wasn’t consistent & I couldn’t have my toddler with me, so I let it go when the season ended. 

     Luckily, mental health was still there, waiting for ya girl to come to her senses & come on back home. I haven’t left since, & that was probably 2007. The more I experienced, the more intrigued I became. There’s so much people don’t know & don’t realize about the stigma put on the topic. It’s no different than physical health: your mind is sick & you most likely had nothing to do with it emerging. 🥺

     Since I know firsthand about the lack of resources for mental health, I understand the importance of educating people on the subject. 💯 It has to start when people are young. Mental health doesn’t have an age, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, or any other classification of people there is. The suicide rates are alarming (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide). It’s a major reason why I made sure Intentional had something for kids too.

The Perfect Combo of Spices: Youthful Reflections & the Intentional Youth Planners 📚

After I launched the adult Intentional Journals & Planners, I knew I needed to branch out to touch more people. Can’t have a self-care mission without being all-inclusive. Between That Lil Girl asking for me to make her a journal & planner & watching the numbers of kids I’m hunting for inpatient psych beds at work grow, additional tools were needed. 🛠️

     Our youth planners came first. They were fairly easy to create, especially since I’d already made the adult planners. I knew I wanted them to focus primarily on the school year because that’s the most important & active time in their lives. 🚌 It only took a few hours to find strong positive affirmations & a format, & it was full steam ahead.

     The journals, Youthful Reflections, took a lot more brainstorming & planning. 🧠 I wanted it to be more than something to write in, like a diary. My vision was more on the lines of a coping mechanism. That’s when a chose to focus more on the mental & emotional health side of growing up for the youth journals. 

     Today’s youth have so much more on their heads than I did growing up. The internet alone is enough to cause mental & emotional stress. People are sooooo mean that it’s ridiculous. And it seems like it’s more of a priority to go viral than to graduate with honors. 🎓 Very different times!

     Knowing who your team is matters & can make a world of difference. That was the inspiration for the “My Breaking Point Plan” section. It gives the young person the opportunity to figure out their triggers & who they can call in certain scenarios that will help them push through. That section also has resources they can contact if they’re battling mental health issues, & I pray it helps someone. 🙏🏽

     The Self-Love page is just that: a space to boost their own heads up. The more they learn to love themselves, the less they worry about what the latest trend to fit in is. There’s also a section at the bottom of each daily page to list something they loved about themselves that day, something they conquered, & something they’re grateful for. 🥰 Great ways to end on a positive note. 

     One of the most important parts of the journals are the sections on each page that are specifically for mental & emotional health. We included our signature affirmations, but there’s also a daily mood chart that can assist with symptom tracking if needed. At the bottom, there’s a section for choosing how they want to feel the next day. Both can help them connect to their feelings & gain a better understanding that it’s ok to not be ok. 👌🏽 

     Creating products that kids can use is something I’m invested in. I want my kids to experience & come in contact with a little of everything. I don’t want much to surprise them & they not be prepared for what’s to come. And I want those same things for other youth. After all, these are the people that will lead this world as we age & after we’re gone. 🌏 You have to leave a lasting legacy!