What is it that helps mental health professionals turn up to their work every day, listening to the concerns of children and families and being able to remain buoyant? This presentation will explore ideas of hope and how it can be drawn upon to help mental health professionals support the children and families they work with. The role of reflexivity and self-care will be considered with the opportunity for participants to reflect on these.

Bearing witness to children's concerns about their lives, worries and problem-saturated stories, can lead us to question our role in supporting children and their families when the world around them is uncertain. Living through the COVID pandemic and its aftermath, increasing climate events and witnessing economic pressures their families are under can lead to impacts on their development and also affect their sense of hope for the future. Responses of adults around them are critical in determining how children can learn to cope with uncertainty and continue to grow and develop in healthy ways.

Mental health professionals are living in a parallel world as they may also encounter these challenges in their own lives alongside their work with children and their families. This can lead to questions about what hope means to us and the people we work with, what we can do to maintain our own hopefulness and importantly to not lose hope.