Caring for Mental Health in Early Childhood Education Settings

In the days following the fire, children were clearly upset by the experience and some parents reported that their children had nightmares. The primary goal of child- or family-centered consultation is to identify and address factors that affect a child’s or family’s ability to function well in an early childhood setting. The consultant’s role is different from, but works alongside, other early childhood supports and services.

This toolkit will give you an overarching plan for addressing early childhood mental health and promoting strategies in your community. When mental health is supported in early childhood, children are healthier, happier, and more likely to succeed. This approach also supports relational health by guiding the development of healthy social and emotional behaviors.

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• In future studies, it would be beneficial to explore the effects of attachment and reflective functioning programs on universal samples, and on targeted samples which include both parents, as this is a gap in the literature.
• Reference tracking of relevant articles was also used, and websites of specific programs were searched for reference lists.
• California’s Master Plan for Early Learning and Care calls for access to IECMHC as a strategy to eliminate bias and inequitable practices in ECE settings.37 According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, Medicaid pays for early childhood mental health specialists to address child mental health needs in ECE programs in 35 states.38
• This early period during which the brain is exquisitely sensitive to the positive aspects of caregiving also renders it vulnerable to stressors.
• Stepped Care 2.0© (SC2.0) is a transformative model for organizing and delivering evidence-informed mental health and substance use services.

Esbjørn et al. (2013) found that low maternal RF predicted higher levels of anxiety amongst clinically anxious school aged children. Parents with low PRF are more likely to display insensitive parenting and to have to have children with insecure or disorganized attachment styles (Grienenberger et al., 2005; Slade et al., 2005a; Suchman et al., 2010; Stacks et al., 2014; Ensink et al., 2015, 2019). Parental mentalizing has been operationalized as parental Reflective Functioning (PRF), and refers to the quality of mentalizing in the context of attachment relationships, and the parent’s capacity to think about mental states in relation to their own and their child’s behavior.

Research Funded by NIMH

The UC San Francisco Infancy/Early Childhood Mental Health Consortium is working with 11 rural northern counties to offer an array of professional development opportunities to seed and support an IECMH workforce in that region.51 The initiative is focusing on organizations that serve the Native American/Tribal population to reduce isolation and heal historical trauma. Some stakeholders highlighted the need for loan repayment programs to incentivize clinicians to move to those communities. One MHSA coordinator said it would be impossible for a child psychologist or psychiatrist to sustain a practice in her county, given what would be an insufficient demand for their services. Training programs or other incentives for rural communities may be particularly important. In Yolo County, one-time MHSA funding put a cohort of providers through the Napa Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship program at UC Davis.

Knowledge of the effective components of these interventions can be used to inform the development of future prevention efforts, with the aim of optimizing mental health outcomes for infants and their families. Parent interventions ideally focus on improving the parents’ mental health as well as building protective factors that will benefit their children. Pregnancy and infancy are important developmental periods where the mental wellbeing of both parents and infants needs to be considered in order to prevent the emergence of mental health difficulties during infancy and early 88 ways to get mental health support childhood.

Because children are frequently in a pediatrician’s office for well-child visits, there is an opportunity to assess the social emotional wellbeing of a child. The model meets parents and children in the digital space, as well as face-to-face, is socially and culturally responsive, takes an LCHD approach, strives to be socially just, and makes sound economic sense. We hold that a lack of access to integrated family-based relational health care has contributed to an overutilization of psychoactive medications as a consequence of inadequate access to other, often more appropriate and effective, nonpharmacologic treatments.