Impacts of Family Environment on Infant

Impacts of Family Environment on Infant
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Impacts of Family Environment on Infant
A positive family environment is a primary foundation for an infant’s physical, psychological, emotional, and physiological development. In particular, young children’s surroundings play significant roles in their growth and development. A safe and healthy home environment is crucial for an infant to learn, explore, and grow. On the contrary, a problematic family environment can have adverse effects on a young child’s emotional, social, and intellectual development. A negative home environment can cause impaired child development, such as behavioral problems and poor language skills. The paper focuses on the impact of the family environment on an infant’s growth and development.
Charles Zeanah and Paula Doyle Zeanah define infant mental health as the young child’s capacity to regulate, experience, and express emotions, explore their surroundings, learn, and form secure and close relationships (Zeanah & Zeanah, 2019). All these infant capacities can be accomplished in the context of a proper caregiving environment that might include cultural, family, and community expectations of young children. The first three years of a child’s life are significant in how an infant perceives things through observation and forms attachments with family members. For example, during this period, a child learns how to talk, walk, and express feelings. However, a hostile home environment can make an infant miss out on numerous life lessons, which might affect the child for the rest of his or her life.
Schechter et al. (2019) argue that infant maltreatment and experiences of violence adversely alter subsequent family environment expectations, social and psychological functioning, and neurobiological development. The more multiple, frequent, and enduring exposure to violence, the greater young children encounter developmental and behavioral difficulties (Schechter, Willheim, Suardi, & Serpa, 2019). In some cases, infants are witnesses or victims of familial, community, and interpersonal violence. Today, young children can also suffer from universal access to the Internet-transmitted media. Based on the 2014 Child Maltreatment report by the United States of America’s (USA) Department of Health and Human Services, about 75% of children were victims of child maltreatment, 8.3% sexual abuse, and 17% physical abuse from 2010 to 2014. Child fatalities below a year was 17.96 per 100,000 (Schechter, Willheim, Suardi, & Serpa, 2019). Consequently, violence in the family environment adversely affects infants’ growth and developmental process.
Although numerous studies have focused on the effect of COVID-19 on adults’ mental health, only a few of them focus on infant mental health. In reality, young children have as well been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Infants’ mental health and well-being are dependent on that of the family unit. The dependency is more pronounced during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic when young children do not have proper access to internal and external support ...