Good Mental Health Starts in Infancy

By Wenda Reed

Although mental health problems are usually diagnosed well into childhood, or more commonly in adolescence and adulthood, the road to optimal mental health begins in infancy. Its basis is the attachment between the baby and his or her parents and caregivers.

Kathryn Barnard, Ph.D., R.N., director of the Center on Infant Mental Health & Development at the University of Washington in Seattle, has been a leader in the field for more than 30 years and her Feeding and Teaching Scales are used to assess parent-child interactions all over the world.

"It's as simple and as complex as being able to make an emotional connection, a quality relationship," Barnard says.

A child who feels secure in his attachment to his parent or caregiver is then free to explore his world and relate to the people in it without anxiety or fear.

In their outreach to at-risk parents, Barnard and her staff encourage a lot of physical contact between babies and caregivers. Barnard cites a recent study in which some parents were given a carseat for their baby to sit in while the parent went about her daily business. Others were given a Snugli®, in which they kept their babies close to their bodies while they went about daily activities. After three months, the babies in Snuglies® were more attached to their caregivers and showed more signs of feeling secure.

However, a parent who is close to a baby without responding to or understanding her cues may be seen as "smothering," according to literature published by Attachment Parenting International, a national organization that helps establish local support groups and publishes materials for parents and professionals. If a parent continues to try to interact with a baby after she's overstimulated, the baby learns that her responses do not matter.

"A lot of babies are hyper- or hypo-sensitive, so they have difficulty processing stimuli. They look like they're rejecting the parent," Barnard explains. "Parents should see what their sensory preferences are and go with that."

Nature or Nurture?

Many mental health disorders, including depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, are known to have a genetic component. However, in their groundbreaking book, Parenting from the Inside Out, Daniel Siegel, M.D., and Mary Hartzell, M.Ed., cite research showing that nurturing experiences directly affect how - and even whether - genes become expressed.

"In the presence of an unhealthy variant, lack of proper nurture can lead to its activation," they write. In other words, genes and the child's experience interact.

"The way a child is nurtured changes the wiring of the brain," Barnard summarizes.