"An Intervention to Increase Early Childhood Staff Capacity for Promoting Children's

Social-Emotional Development in Preschool Settings."

Green, Beth L., Malsch, Anna M., Kothari, Brianne Hood, Busse, Jessica, and
Brennan, Eileen.

Early Childhood Education Journal 40.2 (2012): 123-32. Web.

Hypothesis:
“To what extent could we successfully implement a multifaceted capacity-
development project focused on strengthening early childhood mental health
supports within Head Start?”

The main point the researchers make is to help Head Start and preschool
programs to enhance their ability to support children's social emotional development.
The researchers say that Head Start and preschool programs would benefit from paying
more attention to their mental health programs, supporting staff wellness and using
mental health consultants. They say if more attention was paid to these specific
subjects/programs and if they received the proper training, that it would result in better
social emotional outcomes.

Methodology:
“The management teams at both Head Start programs spent considerable time
and effort working with the research project team, including (1) incorporating
time on management team meeting agendas dedicated to research team
update/discussion; (2) participating (and allowing staff to participate in) strategic
planning meetings as well as staff wellness committee meetings; and (3) staff
training time.”

The researchers conducted two experiments which included two Head Start
programs participation. Their first step in the intervention process was to find the
strengths the programs already had. They had staff take surveys to figure out their
knowledge, perceptions and experiences. They then started training staff on early
childhood mental health as well as conducting staff wellness meetings. Additionally,
they worked with each of the Head Starts Mental health consultants to evaluate their
strategies as well as to have them train staff on children's mental health.

Author’s conclusions:
 The researchers concluded that proving both programs with the proper training
and strategies brought attention to mental health issues which kept the issue a priority.
The intervention also helped the programs to work together to try and better their
strategies to achieve the goal of bettering children's social emotional development. They
also concluded that with this intervention, they were able to realize that one mental
health consultant was not suitable for the job because she could not keep up with the
high volume of children that needed the attention of a mental health consultant. They
were able to hire a new consultant that was more qualified for the job and that had a
better strategy to help children as well as staff. Overall, they say the results were
modest but still helped improve the quality of mental health services in both Head Start
programs.

Your critique:

I enjoyed reading this journal because I think children’s social emotional

development should be a priority in all early childhood programs. I thought their
approach of an intervention was creative and successful. It is important that people
understand mental health and bringing attention to the issue definitely helped staff
realize it. I also thought the approach gave the Head Start programs the guidance they
needed to be better equipped with the proper mental health consultants to achieve
better social emotional development in children.

How information could be used in the early childhood field:

I think this approach could be used in the early childhood field by providing
guidance to early childhood programs on how to come up with strategies to provide the
necessary knowledge to create an environment that prioritizes children's social
emotional development. I feel an intervention would also be useful to determine whether
or not a current mental health consultant is qualified for the job. This information would
also be helpful because it brings up the issue of mental health and its importance.