Importance of Early Childhood Experience to Mental Health
Steering Committee
November 04, 2022
The importance of early childhood experiences to a person’s mental health cannot be overstated. As the study of early childhood continues to evolve, we learn more and more about the effects early experiences can have on a person’s physical and mental health. As we work with children and their families it is important to understand how those early experiences impact their ability to attend, engage, and participate in the activities we expect them to. As the aftereffects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic continue to affect the families we serve – higher costs for gas, utilities, food, rising community violence, etc. – we must take into consideration people’s ability to cope and function under this amount of stress. The environment we create and the experiences we provide affect much more than just learning.
“The rapidly advancing frontiers of 21st-century biological sciences now provide compelling evidence that the foundations of lifelong health are also built early, with increasing evidence of the importance of the prenatal period and first few years after birth.”1
The science is clear on two points:
- What happens during this period can have substantial effects on both short- and long-term outcomes in learning, behavior, and both physical and mental health.
- All of these domains are remarkably interdependent and the potential for learning is inexorably linked to the quality of physical and mental health.1
The above referenced white paper from Shonkoff, et al likens the human body and its systems to a team of highly skilled athletes who each have a special talent that complements the others and as each learns and adjusts their position, the rest react and learn and adjust their position to face the current opponent. As each team member fine tunes their positions, adjustments are made to run the team at its optimum. If there is a breakdown in any part of the team – it affects how the whole works together. The breakdown can happen when the brain is exposed to early and prolonged adversity. This has consequences for all systems in the body but especially the:
- Emotion regulation systems
- Memory systems
- Executive function systems
Brief system activation is good, as this is what prepares the body and brain to respond to a threat, but long-term, severe activation is not. This is what leads the brain to get “stuck” in a state of high alert and prevents appropriate responses to stress and threats. This wear-and-tear can have long-term harmful effects, not just for physical health but for mental health and learning as well.
As we learn more about how the body’s systems are affected, we must adjust our policies and procedures to best serve the children and families in our care. Addressing the factors that affect children and their families as early as possible is much better than trying to ameliorate the results later. We must move beyond screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and education of caregivers to modifying our own systems of care to effectively lessen these circumstances. We know that there are proven ways to do that – for example, we know that supportive adult relationships help mitigate these effects. That means it is important for us to support caregivers in establishing these supportive relationships with their children and to support them in taking care of themselves to have the bandwidth to be consistent, nurturing, and supportive to their children. Helping families build health-promoting environments for their children is imperative, assisting with building a foundation that will reduce the risks for their children, even after early life adversity. It is important to assist caregivers in building core life skills to help them in managing family, work, and relationships. We can do this by ensuring that our approach includes building relationships with the children and families in our care, by making sure basic needs are met, simplifying and streamlining our services, and using accessible, familiar tools to help caregivers navigate our systems of care. It is through our relationships that we can make a difference in the lives of the children and families we serve.
References:
- National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2020). Connecting the Brain to the Rest of the Body: Early Childhood Development and Lifelong Health Are Deeply Intertwined Working Paper No. 15
- Shonkoff JP. Capitalizing on Advances in Science to Reduce the Health Consequences of Early Childhood Adversity. JAMA Pediatr. 2016;170(10):1003–1007. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2016.1559
Resources:
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