By Rahil D. Briggs, Psychology Today, October 19, 2021
World Mental Health Day was October 10 and the American Academy of Pediatrics, alongside the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association, just declared a national state of emergency in child and adolescent mental health.
These kinds of public acknowledgments about the importance of mental health suggest we have come a long way toward recognizing its impact. Yet, infant and early childhood mental health (yes, babies have mental health!) is still barely recognized among the public despite decades of research that show the disproportionate impact of early childhood on future health and well-being.
Our mental health affects and is affected by both social-emotional and early relational health (ERH). If we created a Venn diagram of the ways in which these different ways to be healthy are related, there would be a lot of overlap. It’s difficult to tease out one kind of health entirely from another.
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