Maternal Mental Illness and Early Parenting Interventions

Abstract

The importance of the “1001 critical days” (conception to age 2) underlies the need to act early in life to enhance children's developmental outcomes. Lack of intervention is likely to affect the children of today but also the generations to come. For adults, transition to parenthood is a major stressful life event. The strong emotional load of this experience can make this transitional period much more challenging for adults with psychological, social and economic vulnerabilities, and lead to unadjusted interactions.

Then, applying the “transactional model of development” (Sameroff, 2009) to the early perinatal period helps us to understand how the needs of infants can easily affect a parent's mental state and induce inadequate parenting behaviors. These in turn make the infant's interactions more difficult and the infant's development more likely to be impaired. Perinatal mental health is thus an important public health challenge for it is essential to provide services to enhance maternal and infant emotional well-being at a moment that is simultaneously when the mother's social and emotional vulnerabilities are at their height and a critical time in the child's development.

Perinatal mental health policies, including joint care of parents and infants, must provide positive support for the potential virtuous circle between the skills and vulnerabilities of the infant and the parents.

This presentation will explore the different types of joined perinatal care for parents and infants that cover a range of services, from parent-infant psychotherapies to joint mother-baby hospitalizations.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.