This month, we spoke with Diane Wilcox, CEO of children’s mental health organisation The Magic Coat Foundation, about its mission to create calm, confident and caring kids.
The foundation runs a program that assists with developing children’s social and emotional well-being. Its success led to the adaptation of the Magic Coat into a storybook to make the strategies taught in the program more accessible.
With its strong involvement in the community, The Magic Coat Foundation has extended its program to help rural Indigenous communities and women in prison, and run workshops for students and teachers.
Recently, in light of the war in Ukraine, the Magic Coat developed a special edition of the storybook to help Ukrainian refugee children. As the foundation builds resilience and helps children learn vital skills, it continues to evolve and adapt to cater for different challenges that children face.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and why The Magic Coat Foundation was founded.
I have two degrees, one in Social Science … and another in Education, and I taught for 20 years in primary schools both nationally and internationally. While I was teaching, I realised that there’s so much pressure on educators to ensure children perform academically but we’re not focused on the child’s social and emotional well-being, which never made sense to me because, if a child feels socially and emotionally well, they’ll perform at their best academically.
I also realised there’s a real need for a common language that parents, teachers and children could speak when it comes to social and emotional literacy, so I created the Magic Coat because it was simple enough for anyone and everyone to understand regardless of culture, age or background.
The Magic Coat Foundation was founded because we recognised a need in the community to support children’s mental health. There are many services available for teens and adults but very little for children, so the foundation supports children aged four to 11 years.
What are the mission and goals of the foundation?
The mission is to create calm, caring and confident children who can be resilient in many different situations. We want to prepare children for the challenges that life will throw their way, and give them the confidence to know that they have everything they need within themselves to be OK.
What is the Magic Coat? What does it represent?
The Magic Coat is an analogy where children are asked to put on an imaginary magic coat. Inside this coat live a number of different characters. Each character represents a different cognitive behaviour or positive psychology strategy that children are reminded to use when circumstances arise. The brightly coloured characters help children to understand abstract concepts more easily, and because they’re characters, children tend to connect and remember them.
The Magic Coat is for all children but is particularly useful for those children who don’t have a trusted adult in their world. The Magic Coat reminds children they have everything they need to get through these difficult times, even when they can’t find the support of someone else.
What prompted you to turn the Magic Coat into a storybook?
I was running a series of workshops for schools when a principal came up to me. He told me that this was brilliant, but the parents and children who need this the most aren’t at the workshop and are unlikely to ever turn up to a workshop. I was lying in bed that night trying to think of a solution to this when I realised that most parents aren’t threatened by a storybook, so I wrote the book. And we just released our brand new second edition with new characters, concepts and strategies.
Tell us about what the Magic Coat program teaches children.
The Magic Coat program teaches a number of different skills that each relate to a child’s overall social/emotional well-being. Some of these things include:
- Being able to identify different feelings felt by yourself and others.
- How to self-regulate different feelings.
- Being able to communicate effectively with others so that you’re heard but you hear others too.
- Tools to manage feelings of anxiety and worry.
- Tools to manage feelings of anger.
- How to have overall physical well-being, eg, the importance of sleep, physical exercise, diet, etc.
- Tools to build self-confidence and self-esteem.
- The importance of having respect for yourself and others.
- Knowing the difference between healthy and unhealthy friendships.
- How to find the courage to try new things so you can grow as a person.
- Understanding that people are different to us and that is OK.
Why is it important that children develop social and emotional skills? How does this link to positive mental health and well-being?
Social and emotional skills are essential to connect with other people. These skills help us to manage emotions, build healthy relationships and to have empathy for others.
Children with good social and emotional skills are more likely to succeed in school, work and life. These skills help children to:
- Make friends easily.
- Resolve conflict.
- Manage anxiety.
- Make appropriate decisions.
- Learn their own strengths and weaknesses.
- Learn social norms.
Social and emotional learning gives children the opportunity to build resilience to deal with change and unpredictability, which is an essential skill for positive mental health.
Can you tell us about some of the community initiatives that the foundation has been involved in?
We run workshops for women in prison who are preparing to reunite with their children, so they have a simple and common language to support their children’s social and emotional learning. For many of these women, learning the strategies in the Magic Coat helps them too.
We run workshops and teacher training for schools. The foundation ensures schools with low socioeconomic populations have free access to the resources and workshops.
We’re about to launch our first Aboriginal Indigenous book. I collaborated with two Indigenous people who ensured the book was culturally appropriate and illustrated by an Indigenous artist. The foundation will be connecting with mining organisations to ensure the book and workshops are given freely to remote Aboriginal communities around Australia.
We’re piloting a program in Perth Children’s Hospital to see how the Magic Coat reduces the anxiety levels of children about to go into surgery.
Can you tell us about The Magic Heart for Ukraine?
This was a really out-of-the-blue project but a really important one. One of our directors, Thomas Emery, went over to Germany to support refugees crossing the borders of Ukraine into Germany and Poland, seeking refuge from the war. Tom contacted me to say these children need the Magic Coat as they’re going through so much. So I wrote a book, especially for Ukrainian refugee children.
It talks about losing your home and loved ones and gives them strategies to manage the anxiety, loss, and pain of what they are going through.
I wasn’t expecting the response we got but teachers, psychologists and parents from Poland, Ukraine and Germany loved the book. They were setting up The Magic Coat in bomb shelters, and while children were hiding, their teachers would run Magic Coat classes in the bomb shelters to calm and help these frightened children. The schools started running Magic Coat lessons and sending us photos. It was just incredible. The foundation ended up sending 15,000 books to these children.
Do you hope to develop the program further, and what are your plans for the future?
The Magic Coat just constantly evolves, and it needs to, because of the changing world our children live in. We want to reach as many children around the world as we can.
I’ll continue to adapt the book to suit different challenges that children might face. I’ve just been asked by a real estate agency to write a storybook that helps children to move house, so I’m working on this now.
How can retail pharmacy assistants get involved, learn more, or support your work?
We’d love to see the book and resources sold in pharmacies so that it’s easily accessible to families. We’re also always looking for organisations that can find a way to help us fundraise, so we can get the resources to the most vulnerable in the community.
This feature was originally published in the October issue of Retail Pharmacy Assistants e-magazine.
