Breaking the Silence: Meeting the mental health needs of young children and their families.

For decades, kids have not received the mental health help they need. One in five children and adolescents has an impairing mental health disorder. Yet, only 50% of kids ever receive mental health treatment, and even fewer receive evidence-based treatment that works.

Younger children have been forgotten in the national dialogue about the child mental health crisis. Infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary school-age children have the same rates of impairing mental health disorders as teens. Yet, they are even less likely to receive mental health care than older children. Despite the fact that we know that early identification and intervention for mental health disorders in the early years of life improve outcomes across childhood and adulthood, our current solutions to address the child mental health crisis focus primarily on teens.

The children’s mental health crisis is one part of a broader mental health crisis. Rates of parent mental health disorders are also rising. Together the child and parent mental health crises impact the family’s functioning and adversely affect family relationships: the parent-child relationships, sibling relationships, parent-partner relationships, and co-parenting relationships, creating what we call a family mental health crisis.