MENTAL HEALTH >> Mental Wellness

Promotion of positive mental wellness is important for Early Head Start and Head Start children, families, staff and communities. Mental health promotion requires a comprehensive preventive health approach that encompasses each aspect of the many issues impacting children and families today such as employment and education, behavioral health, child development, health and safety, children’s health, parent and family health, father inclusion and relationships. Strengthening parenting knowledge and skills, improving family relationships, social and emotional development for EHS and HS children, and increasing a community’s capacity to support families have long-term benefits for a child’s and family health.

What Does Mental Health Look Like

There are individual, family, and cultural variations in how someone who is mentally healthy feels and behaves. While there is no one definition of mental health, and while many roads can lead there, mentally healthy young children display the following characteristics (Stanley Greenspan and Nancy Thomdike Greenspan, First Feelings, (New York: Viking, 1985)):

• capacity for warm, trusting relationships with other children and adults
• positive self-esteem: a feeling that they can be effective and make things happen in the world
• developmentally appropriate control of impulses and behavior; a progressively developing ability to handle assertiveness, curiosity, and anger according to the norms of society, the peer group, and the particular setting (e.g., Head Start, playground, home)
• progressively increasing ability to express needs, feelings, and ideas with words
• beginnings of empathy and compassion for others; deals (in a developmentally appropriate way) with loss and limitations
• acquiring the skills to concentrate, focus, and plan as a basis for learning

Mental wellness is important for parents and staff.