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 inti...