This Mental Health Awareness Month, Recognizing the Need For Behavioral Health Supports For Our Youngest Children
May marks the 75th annual Mental Health Awareness Month, and at Neighborhood Villages, we are using it as an opportunity to advocate for more support for children’s behavioral health needs and to provide an update on our work to address this critical issue.
There is no doubt that we are in the midst of a children's mental health crisis.
It’s often discussed in the context of our teens, or even elementary-aged children. But the discussion and solutions often fail to include what may be the most important time to identify mental health issues and offer nurturing environments to alleviate them — in early childhood when children are under five years old.
Across the country, an estimated 10-16% of young children experience behavioral and mental health conditions, rising to 22% for children impacted by poverty. In Massachusetts, an increase in the number of children requiring a high-level of support has been identified as an urgent challenge by our partner early childhood education programs (The Neighborhood), as well as Head Start MA, the MA Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and CHIMEBoston.
The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University has also studied the lifelong impact of early childhood mental health.
All of the experts agree: early childhood education (ECE) programs play an essential role in addressing health equity gaps and supporting optimal outcomes for children and families, including fostering children’s cognitive and social-emotional development.
However, as the number of young children requiring a high-level of support increases, ECE programs struggle to balance student needs and classroom quality. Often, educators receive limited training on how to foster children’s social-emotional growth. This leads to high levels of burnout and turnover for teachers (against the backdrop of an existing ECE workforce crisis).
This dynamic contributes to poorer outcomes for children, including the suspension or expulsion of young children from ECE settings, with children of color disproportionately impacted. Studies have demonstrated that access to behavioral and mental health supports in ECE settings leads to improved outcomes for children and lower rates of preschool expulsion. Despite this, little investment has been made in the ECE sector’s ability to provide or support coordinated educator and parent access to behavioral health supports.
To meet this need, Neighborhood Villages has partnered with the Brazelton Touchpoints Center and other experts to create a menu of resources to meet the behavioral and mental health needs of children in ECE settings, mirroring the multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) used by K-12 school systems.
Our current model includes coordinated support through infant and early childhood mental health consultation (IECMHC) services; needs-based educator coaching; and the implementation of funded staffing supports and communities of practice to increase access to referral-based student and classroom support services.
Investing in the staffing and infrastructure supports necessary to implement our MTSS for ECE across The Neighborhood is a strategic priority for us in the years to come. The Neighborhood is a network of five Boston-based early education providers for which Neighborhood Villages serves as a centralized hub of support: the program models the ways in which K-12 districts support individual schools. Presently, The Neighborhood serves approximately 3,000 people, including 900 children.
In partnership with Jewish Family & Children’s Services and Walker Therapeutic Solutions, we are providing mental and behavioral health services inclusive of curriculum, consultation, and referrals to children, families, and educators across The Neighborhood. Early feedback from our partner programs is incredibly positive.
Our goal is to pilot this program, and offer evidence-based solutions (informed by data collected from this project) to expand access to behavioral and mental health supports in ECE settings across the state.
And while we continue to iterate this pilot program, we are hopeful that the result is a scalable new approach to addressing the behavioral health crisis in Massachusetts and a model nationally.
Stay tuned for updates as we dig into this work!