Infancy and Mental Health Counseling

Most parents know little of infant mental health or why it is important. Infant mental health begins from birth to three years of age and impacts a child’s ability to develop secure interpersonal relationships, express emotions, and explore the environment and learn. During infancy, the brain is developing ways to learn and adapt how the child will relate to others. If signs of poor mental health arise, interventions are more powerful and longer lasting during this stage of development than later stages. The first three years of life are full of rapid physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Healthy infant development involves physical development and sensory and perceptual development. An issue in this stage of development that could impact clients in a mental health therapy is that adults seeking mental health therapy may not have had a healthy infant development. A client’s sleep could arise as an issue, and I typically ask about sleep pattern during the initial intake.

A client may experience issues with temperament and identity development or even issues in the area of attachment. The avoidant, disorganized-disoriented, and anxious-resistant attachment types could present in clients. Having a secure attachment does help to create healthy relationships that are dependable (Wong et al., 2021). In practice, one of my favorite things to do is to provide parent coaching to giving parents more tools to use with their children.

Discussing with parents about brain development is an important component because parents expect chronological age to determine some growth milestones and it is important to make parents aware that their child develops in their own time. Parents often expect children’s minds to develop the same way they can measure or compare their child’s physical growth to other children’s, but this is not the case.

In my experience, the clients that have had developmental complications had physical ailments (like liver failure) that caused them to fall behind in other areas of their development because of the amount of time required attending to physical medical needs or extended hospitalizations for surgeries for example. Issues that are presented in counseling as a result of unhealthy infant development are Parent Education regarding discipline for the infant, sleep management, physical punishment, and attachment Parenting (Wong et al., 2021).

Reference: Wong, D. W., Hall, K. R., & Hernandez, L. W. (2021). Counseling individuals through the lifespan (2nd ed.). Sage.