The Crisis of Youth Mental Health [ssir.org]

Laura Haynes Collector posted:

We are losing inter-generationally-transmitted parenting practices at a very fast rate, and this is devastating child mental health.  People who have not been parented themselves do not have a natural, intuitive sense of what healthy parenting practices are.   

This problem is then exacerbated by separating many mothers from babies in daycare at too-early an age for too many hours.  Even an able, caring well-parented Mom may not have enough *time* with her baby to impart the basic security a baby needs.  We have to stop pussyfooting around this fact and re-examine daycare in general as an ACE due to the plunge in child mental health ever since center-based care of babies began in 1985.  People are so concerned not to hurt feelings of /stigmatize *mothers* that the plain facts of development and attachment are not considered, and we hurt babies instead.  Government will never pay for something we fail to define as a deep, immutable need.

Babies learn to attach by repeated experiences of availability, empathy, and safety.  By being intuited and mirrored thousands of times.  Even the best day care, they get 20% of the focused attention they would otherwise get in a dyad.  Not to mention the serial losses of the caregivers they do bond with, if they bond.  (We see what zero % of dyadic care does when we look at Romanian orphans.)  

Allan Schore describes a brain-to-brain, intuitive, responsive interaction by which "the right brain of the mother becomes the right brain of the child."  Attachment is the result of this process.  What happens when there is nobody providing attunement for the majority of the day, for about a third of the children in the USA....?  We get a 25% rate of child mental illness.  I am 58 and remember a very different landscape of child mental health in my youth.

Can some babies still bond to their moms despite daycare?  Yes.   But many cannot.  Gifted Moms and/or very sociable babies may slip through this hazard.  But lack of a dyad and lack of secure attachment can also be a life-long impediment (as we read in the comments on this site every day).  

OUR SPECIES has needs.  Monkey needs.  Primal needs.  Daycare does not meet these needs nearly as well as a friendly calm mother (or other permanent attachment figure) who loves you and empathizes with you and does not move to a different job during your pre-verbal years 0-3 when R brain growth is everything.

We need to carve out a minimum for babies.  We need to pay for parental leave appropriate to developmental needs.  This will be cheap as mental and physical illnesses will drop with a rise in secure attachment.

 

 

 

Thank you for this thoughtful comment, Laura. You are so right that baby mammals all have the same need for attunement, attachment, and nurturance from birth onward. That so many human babies are not getting these needs met is truly a crisis and one that needs a whole reimagining of what mental wellness is and how we cultivate it for our whole society. 

We are losing inter-generationally-transmitted parenting practices at a very fast rate, and this is devastating child mental health.  People who have not been parented themselves do not have a natural, intuitive sense of what healthy parenting practices are.   

This problem is then exacerbated by separating many mothers from babies in daycare at too-early an age for too many hours.  Even an able, caring well-parented Mom may not have enough *time* with her baby to impart the basic security a baby needs.  We have to stop pussyfooting around this fact and re-examine daycare in general as an ACE due to the plunge in child mental health ever since center-based care of babies began in 1985.  People are so concerned not to hurt feelings of /stigmatize *mothers* that the plain facts of development and attachment are not considered, and we hurt babies instead.  Government will never pay for something we fail to define as a deep, immutable need.

Babies learn to attach by repeated experiences of availability, empathy, and safety.  By being intuited and mirrored thousands of times.  Even the best day care, they get 20% of the focused attention they would otherwise get in a dyad.  Not to mention the serial losses of the caregivers they do bond with, if they bond.  (We see what zero % of dyadic care does when we look at Romanian orphans.)  

Allan Schore describes a brain-to-brain, intuitive, responsive interaction by which "the right brain of the mother becomes the right brain of the child."  Attachment is the result of this process.  What happens when there is nobody providing attunement for the majority of the day, for about a third of the children in the USA....?  We get a 25% rate of child mental illness.  I am 58 and remember a very different landscape of child mental health in my youth.

Can some babies still bond to their moms despite daycare?  Yes.   But many cannot.  Gifted Moms and/or very sociable babies may slip through this hazard.  But lack of a dyad and lack of secure attachment can also be a life-long impediment (as we read in the comments on this site every day).  

OUR SPECIES has needs.  Monkey needs.  Primal needs.  Daycare does not meet these needs nearly as well as a friendly calm mother (or other permanent attachment figure) who loves you and empathizes with you and does not move to a different job during your pre-verbal years 0-3 when R brain growth is everything.

We need to carve out a minimum for babies.  We need to pay for parental leave appropriate to developmental needs.  This will be cheap as mental and physical illnesses will drop with a rise in secure attachment.