Judy Swanson: Welcome to a live chat with Christopher Watson, coordinator of the Center for Early Education and Child Development at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. Christopher began is work with CEED on the PAVE project, providing staff development for early childhood professionals in area of violence prevention and intervention. Today he is going to share some information on his current work on a project on the topic of infant and toddler mental health. Welcome, Christopher!

Christopher Watson: Thank you, Judy! Do you have a question to start us off?

Could you start with a definition of Infant Mental Health for us?

Okay. Infant mental health concerns the healthy development of young children with regard to physical, cognitive, and social/emotional domains within the context of their relationships to their primary caregivers. The relationship or attachment piece of this is what we focus on in our attempts to define infant or early childhood mental health , to those who have not become familiar with it.

Can you tell us where the common ground is between child mental health and early childhood education starting with environments?

Sure. Just yesterday, we did a day-long training on the topic of violence prevention and intervention in early childhood. This was based on the project that Judy mentioned in her introduction of me. During that training yesterday, I was again reminded that the issues of social/emotional health and behavior are all interwoven so that there are many commonalities between the topics of challenging behavior, early childhood mental health, and violence in the lives of young children.

The three areas of commonality that I find most striking are those of environments, observation of children, and self-awareness of ourselves as educators and interventionists. With regard to environment in mental health, violence prevention, and challenging behaviors, an assessment of children's environments is the starting point. In each case, our role as adults is to provide a supportive and nurturing environment that sets it up for children to be successful and, at the same time, is flexible enough to meet the differing needs of each individual child.

With regard to observation in mental health, we place a lot of importance in the observational process. We emphasize that educators have to be good observers of children and their families first before intervention takes place. Again, we emphasize the investigative or "wonder" process that seeks to understand why children behave the way they do.

Lastly, the self-awareness portion points to the incredible power we have in our adult behavior in affecting what children do. They are incredibly perceptive of us and if we do not bring awareness of our own behavior to the educational setting, then we are missing a big part of the story. In mental health, we talk about use of the self, and this brings us full circle back to the importance of relationship. That is, relationships between caregivers and their children and between educators and children. I'll stop for a moment for responses.

Hi Christopher, What is the most striking finding in the mental health literature that you believe teachers should know about?

Well, speaking off the top of my head, the first thing that came to mind was the attachment literature that is now becoming more sophisticated with regard to assessing and identifying the variety of attachments that children form with the people in their lives. We used to focus primarily on mother/child relationships because that was a natural starting place and, in a traditional family arrangement, the mother has the most consistent and frequent interaction with the infant. Now we're branching out to look at how important other adults can be to young children. Children develop different attachment relationships with fathers and we're only beginning to understand what that can mean in terms of a child's development.

Likewise, children are able to develop discriminating attachment relationships with different adults. What that boils down to is that for children, adults, including educators and interventionists, are not interchangeable. Some children are attracted to and can develop more meaningful relationships with an adult whom other children do not relate to as well. We are only now beginning to look at what this means for the success of interventions, particularly where the social/emotional component of, say, a developmental delay is primary. Does that answer your question?

Yes, so what would you tell teachers in terms of intervention or attachment?

What I would tell them is that the ways we decide who intervenes and for how long are important decisions. Often, these will be out of the control of teachers, so our practice and our systems need to integrate this awareness. One program in California that I know about emphasizes matching adults and children according to both the child's preference for one adult over others as well as the teacher's preference for one child over others.

The reality is that, as adults, we may say that we "love children" and enjoy working with them, but, if we are honest, we know that we are drawn to some children more than others and that we are successful with some children more than others. So we need to look at how we make decisions so that we are setting both teachers and children up for the greatest likelihood of success. In terms of both child care and elementary education, some systems have begun to implement a process whereby the teachers follow children as they grow and develop across more than one year. So there is a consistency of relationship over time. I'll take a break here for others to speak.

As caregivers and teachers, are there other specific things we should we be watching for in our own behaviors?

The first thing I think of is authenticity in our language and actions with children. We all know how perceptive kids are. They can read our body language, the inflection in our voice, and other cues as well as we can. Teachers and parents who work off scripts when they relate to children become easy to ignore and dismiss, so that's a very general response to your question.

The approach that we encourage is one of active encouragement and support of children's attempts to comply with our agenda and to interact with peers in ways that foster acceptance of them by other children. Another question?

Earlier you talked about supportive and nurturing environments. What characteristics might we be looking for?

Let's start with the physical environment. The physical environment would ensure the easiest transition from one activity to the next; would include a place for children to go to be quiet, to calm down, to be alone. That place would have objects in it that facilitate the process of calming down. It would be "soft" in its physical characteristics (a place to lie down, pillows/carpeting, maybe lower light level, the ability to play soft music, etc.).

The nonphysical characteristics of a nurturing environment would include teachers who are able to read child cues, anticipate tasks or situations that will be challenging for certain children, and therefore proactively adapt to support child success. This greater flexibility may seem, to some, as "giving in" to certain children, but in reality it is ensuring that they have the best chance of being successful. As a teacher, you simply wouldn't set up a child for failure, and that does require both a keen sense of each individual child's capabilities, limits, and vulnerabilities as well as an equally keen sense of your own biases, inflexibilities, and vulnerabilities. Just as in good practice based on the principles that Mary and Joe teach, the teacher is the one that anticipates the child's response.

I think there are a lot more consistencies between a behavioral and what might be called a mental health approach to young children than we realize. I'm hoping that we will be able to spend some time in the near future looking at these different literatures and practices to see exactly how they do align with each other and what each might contribute to the other, expanding the teachers' repertoire of intervention strategies and approaches to working with children.

Can you discuss a little about the difference between bonding and attachment?

Sure. Bonding is traditionally defined as that first reaction parents have to their newborn. Attachment is a process that unfolds over time and speaks to a deeper and more varied level of relationship than "bonding." It looks like we're almost out of time. Thank you so much for inviting me to participate in this chat, Judy.

For any of you who would like further information on infant mental health, please visit the Infant Mental Health Project web site at http://cehd.umn.edu/ceed/projects/imh.

Judy Swanson: Thank you for this interesting discussion, Christopher. Thank you all for joining us.

Printer-friendly pdf version

 Joe Reichle, Ph.D., Co-Principal Investigators
LeAnne Johnson, Project Coordinator
Phone: 612-626-9528 Fax: 612-625-6619 E-mail: chaf0032@umn.edu

[Home] | [Personnel] | [Presentations] | [Strategies] | [Case Studies] | [Discussion] | [Links] | [Contact Us]