Thrive Center Working Paper Series: Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health
Seven new briefs in our working paper series examine the policy decisions that shape a young child’s earliest relationships, in settings from rural clinics to urban systems to hospitals in a war zone. They arrive in a season of proposals to do less for young children rather than more, as budgets stall, protections weaken, and long-standing program requirements come up for elimination. All are brief by design, and close with a concrete step for the people in a position to take it.
Below, Thrive Center Director Matthew Biel, introduces the collection and the moment it arrives in.
A Note from Dr. Matthew Biel
We present here a set of briefs on infant and early childhood mental health. They span the care continuum and different scales of impact both domestically and globally, and together they make one argument: the mental health of a young child is built inside relationships, and those relationships depend on conditions that public policy can nurture or erode.
The briefs describe those conditions. Child care shoud be conceptualized and funded as health infrastructure, rather than treated as a convenience for working parents. Mental health consultation should available to the providers who see young children every day, yet our national scan finds that it is guaranteed only in Head Start settings and is unevenly available elsewhere. Virtual mental health consultation should be made available for rural communities where no consultant is within reach, as programs in North Dakota have begun to implement. A peer workforce can be trained and paid to accompany isolated parents and support healthy family relationships. Local systems can converge to address the interconnected of children’s health, development, and family economic security, as the Early Childhood Innovation Network has done here in Washington. Clinical providers should be prepared to recognize distress in a toddler during a war, as nurses across Israel have been trained to do, and we can recognize the catalytic role that philanthropy can play in getting advancing key initiatives. Climate policy must account for the effects of extreme weather upon pregnant women and young children, who bear the earliest and heaviest costs.
We are publishing these briefs together because the current moment is subtractive. Child care funding has been frozen in some states, payment rules have been loosened in ways that destabilize health care provision, and the standards that make Head Start work are proposed for removal. We are advancing arguments to invest in what young children need, against a steady stream of proposals to provide less.
Each brief is short, and each ends with something a state, a funder, a health system, or a program can act upon. We hope readers use them in exactly that way.
Matthew G. Biel, MD, MSc
Director, Thrive Center for Children, Families and Communities at Georgetown University
Brief 1: Child Care as Essential Health Infrastructure
Brief 2: Trauma-Informed Care for Young Children:
Lessons from a Philanthropy-Government Partnership
Brief 3: So Children and Families Can Thrive:
The Urgent Need to Address Climate Change