Mental Health in Infants and Young Children: Pediatric Mental Health Minute Series

Helping children learn to self-regulate during the early years supports lifelong emotional wellbeing. Responsive and supportive relationships are where adults notice and understand children’s emotions and needs and respond appropriately. The consultant’s role is distinct from and complementary to a continuum of early childhood supports and services, such as child care quality coaches, nurse consultants, or Pyramid Model coaches. Unlike other mental health professionals, IECMH consultants do not provide direct mental health treatment to young children or the adults who surround them.

Consultants are licensed mental health professionals who receive extensive additional training and support to achieve state certification as an Early Childhood Mental Health Consultant to Child Care (see PRiSM profile on Arkansas for more information). Parent reports showed greater improvements in hyperactivity, attention problems, and social skills for CCEP children than for comparison children. Master’s-level and IECMH-endorsed consultants delivered child-focused and programmatic consultation, typically for 1-3 hours per week for 3-6 months. Analyses of a matched group of 19 intervention and 19 control children showed significantly greater spring to fall improvements in teacher-assessed aggressive and maladaptive behavior and growth in adaptive behavior for intervention children. Studies of IECMH consultation as a standalone intervention are grouped separately from those in which consultation was combined with other supports, and within these categories studies with experimental or quasi-experimental designs are listed first. Newly-hired consultants typically receive preservice training on the specific consultation model or practices delivered by the program, and then participate in ongoing supports such as reflective supervision and additional trainings.

Resources in This Guide

This paper focuses specifically on community-based programs in California supporting infants, toddlers, and preschoolers’ social-emotional health, as well as their goals, service models, and funding sources. Environmental stressors such as war, natural disasters and family dislocation also place infants and young children at risk of mental health difficulties, especially if the primary caregiver is rendered less emotionally available by the same stressor (Lyons-Ruth et al., 2017). Oppose cuts to Medicaid to ensure babies and those who care for them can access the mental health services they need; and invest in early childhood mental health funding streams that, in partnership with Medicaid, ensure young children receive needed services. Instead, it gives caregivers tools to support children’s healthy social and emotional development. IECMH is a multidisciplinary field, inclusive of persons from many professional, cultural and community backgrounds, and systems, focusing on enhancing the emotional and social competence of infants, toddlers, and preschool-aged children and their caregivers, through healthy relationships and early experiences. Anyone who touches the lives of babies, young children and their families can contribute to promoting infant and early childhood mental health.

• NHS offers some advice on signs on anxiety in children and how to help.
• An evaluation of CCEP included a quasi-experimental study that compared outcomes of 86 children who received CCEP services with those of 86 children who lived in counties without CCEP and who were reported by parents as having challenging behavior in child care.
• Teachers are part of the first line of defense against mental health issues for children.
• The Mindful Motherhood intervention uses aspects of mindfulness based cognitive therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy, with the goal of reducing the risk of adverse maternal mental health outcomes during the perinatal period (Vieten and Astin, 2008).
• Infant mental health refers to how well a child develops socially and emotionally from birth to three.

Family Partnership Services, 45 CFR §1302.52

The research evidence suggests that the theoretical backgrounds of interpersonal therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, attachment theory and mentalization are ideal starting points for program development. A number of programs considered attachment or parent-infant bonding (Capuozzo et al., 2010; Maskell-Graham, 2014; Kalland et al., 2016; Werner et al., 2016; Tandon et al., 2018). Practical skills training about how to care for the baby was another feature of effective programs (Fisher et al., 2010; Werner et al., 2016). Our findings suggest that mothers, partners and children should all be included for an intervention to be most effective. Furthermore, rates of parental depression and anxiety during the perinatal period emphasize the need for interventions to address mental health during this time (Woody et al., 2017; Philpott and Corcoran, 2018). For this reason, there is scope for early interventions during this period to set children up for a positive future life trajectory.

NHS Every Mind Matters gives advice and information on looking after a child or young person’s mental health. From birth, children have an inbuilt instinct to interact with their caregivers. Some children like having pictures 88 ways to get mental health support of their family they can carry with them. Ask parents and carers what the child enjoys playing with at home. For slightly older children, you could talk to them and offer reassurance that their parent or carer will return. The best outcomes happen when practitioners and parents work together to support a struggling child.