The focus for this year's World Mental Health Day is on our children and rightly so! Did you know most mental illnesses begin from as young as 14 years old? As parents, we are usually the first to notice any changes in our children but we sometimes tend to be hesitant to dig further, to see if there is more going on than meets the eye.

Many mental illnesses are as a result of genes and your child's environment, so there might be little we can do to prevent them but we can get them the help they need.

Having a child with a mental illness is like having a child with a chronic illness (e.g. diabetes, or hypertension); in order to have your child live their very best life, their condition will need to be managed so that their symptoms don't get the best of them.

We want to help you help THEM by knowing the signs to look out for and how to better equip our young ones to handle life's challenges.

Remember what it was like to be a child and the excitement that you felt as the end of the school year approached? Almost 3 months of No SCHOOL… No HOMEWORK … Sleeping late, cartoons and seeing your friends….

Its most likely possible that if you have been a parent for a while, this feeling is overshadowed by the dreaded feeling of; NO School, NO Homework, Kids at home all the time, with more kids at your home all the time and the very peculiar side effect of a holiday when kids wake up SUPER early regardless of how hard it was to get them out of bed the entire school year.

Now apart from Summer Camps, which are loads of fun and great opportunities for your kids to learn or further develop hobbies and skills, as well as, to meet new friends and build their social skills – most camps only host kids for about one to two weeks. Enrolling them in a few camps spread out over the summer is a great way to get them out of the house and into activities they will love and enjoy and create memories that may last a lifetime.

However there are lots of great places to visit around the Caribbean too that combine fun for them and fun for you with much needed R&R in some cases for the parental units. Of course this list is not exclusive and there are many more sites to see and adventures to undertake, however we have done the work of searching for a few for you.