Importance of Caregiver/Child Relationship in Diagnosing and Assessing Infant Mental Health

Infant Mental Health
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Infant Mental Health
Parents or caregivers play crucial roles in young children’s growth and development process. They ensure that young people are safe and healthy and equip them with appropriate resources and skills that help them succeed when they become adults. Additionally, caregivers pass vital cultural values to children, making them recognize their identities. For example, parents give their children guidance, love, encouragement, appreciation, and acceptance. They also provide intimacy, forming the right context for protecting and nurturing their young ones as they grow and develop their identities and personalities and mature socially, physically, emotionally, and cognitively. When children’s needs are met, such as food, clothing, soothing, and shelter, these young people form a strong attachment with their parents. Affection between caregivers and children is vital for the formation and maintenance of a healthy parent-child relationship. Young individuals trust, explore, and interact with their environment when they relate well to their parents or caregivers. The caregiver-child relationship should be used as a framework for assessing and diagnosing young children.
Infant mental health refers to children’s capacity to regulate, experience, express emotions, learn by exploring the environment, and create secure relationships (Zeanah & Zeanah, 2019). Specifically, a child accomplishes these capacities in the context of a conducive caregiving environment that includes the community, family, cultural values, and expectations of young children. Infants are dependent on the environment created by their caregivers, and their competence might vary in distinctive caregiving contexts. When clinicians assess or diagnose young people, they have to identify existing problems in parents or caregivers to solve them effectively. Proper children’s mental health interventions occur by identifying parents’ relationships with their infants and resolving such conflicts without forgetting to use it as the framework for addressing other existing issues. A proper relationship between children and caregivers makes young individuals feel accepted, loved, and understood, providing these people with a strong sense of self-worth and security (Zeanah & Zeanah, 2019). Children’s health practitioners attempt to understand young people’s experiences to identify the challenges and help caregivers overcome them. That explains why young children’s mental health cannot be assessed or diagnosed without first studying the parent-child relationship.
Attachment entails the infant’s tendency to seek support, comfort, protection, and nurturance from a few caregivers (Finelli et al., 2019). Children seek protection and comfort selectively from parents or caregivers they have learned that they can rely on but not everyone they interact with regularly. The attachment theory reveals that infants’ behaviors toward these caregivers are usually guided by “internal working models.” This phrase describes how children construct expectations through intimate relationships with their caregivers to know whether they can trust them or not based on how they behave or feel during their interactions. Specifically, the internal working models have selective attention to the incoming social information. They comprise salient social cues, memories of previous relationships or interactions, feelings elicited during these interactions, and infants’ responses to others. Corval et al. (2019) assert that the quality of children-caregivers relationships determines how young people behave or how they perceive things that they come across when growing up (Corval et al., 2019). In particular, attachment is a crucial component of an infant’s emotional and social development during the early years after birth and is an important indicator of children’s mental health. That is why the child-caregiver relationship should be used as the primary framework for assessing and diagnosing children. Consequently, young people should experience an intimate, continuous, and warm relationship with their caregivers in which both enjoy and are satisfied.
Children’s attachment to caregivers is absent at birth and develops slowly during the first year after birth. Infants who are raised in hostile or extreme caregiving environments might develop attachment disorders. For instance, reactive attachment disorder (RAD) refers to indiscriminate or minimal attachment behavior at the time when a child’s attachment behavior needs to be activated (Finelli et al., 2019). The disorder is characterized by reduced social reciprocity and engagement, emotional regulation difficulties, and the lack of organized attachment behaviors. Children with RAD might seek comfort inconsistently or remain distressed and cannot be soothed easily. Additionally, disinhibited social engagement disorder (DSED) entails exhibiting developmentally expected reticence when around strangers. The condition can be manifested by the child’s willingness to interact with unfamiliar adults, the failure of a young person to check the caregiver in unfamiliar settings, and the tendency of wandering off (Finelli et al., 2019). Attachment is a significant component of emotional and social development in children. Disordered attachment is seen through abnormal social behavior or social neglect. Proper assessments of RAD and DSED need direct observation of the young person affected in the context of her or his caregiving environment (Zeanah et al., 2016). Effective treatment of these attachment disorders can occur only when the child-caregiver relationship is well-defined.
Children mental health clinicians understand the significance of understanding the child-caregiver relationship when diagnosing or assessing young individuals. They consistently advocate for a proper comprehension of young children’s emotional connection and functioning in the presence of their parents. The Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) reiterates the significance of understanding the child-caregiver relationship. Indeed, SSP’s “gold standard” entails assessing the quality of infants’ attachment or behaviors after a short separation from their caregivers (Zeanah & Lieberman, 2019). That way, clinicians might identify behavioral patterns that are associated with maladaptive or adaptive social-emotional ...