Getting your money's worth: Mental health consultation in early
childhood education programs
 An
article in the current issue of the RTC’s
journal Focal Point reports on findings from research
about the effectiveness of mental health consultation in early childhood
education programs. The article, entitled “Getting
your money’s worth: What early childhood directors should
know about working with mental health professionals,”
describes the characteristics of effective consultants and effective
consultation services in Head Start programs.
The study’s findings about effective mental health consultation
programs were somewhat surprising. It turned out that a number of
consultant and program characteristics were not
related to staff perceptions of program outcomes, including
- Total number of hours per child of consulting provided;
- Percent of program’s budget spent on mental health services;
- Size of program and program location (urban versus rural);
- Primary race/ethnicity of families being served; and
- Credentials of the consultant (social workers versus clinical
psychologists or number of years of education—though all
consultants had post-college training).
In contrast, several characteristics of mental health consultants
were related to perceived outcomes, including
- The relevant experience of the mental professional in working
with young children and with low-income families;
- The ability of consultants to make a long term commitment to
working with a given program; and
- The extent to which the consultant’s approach reflected
best practice principles, by providing services that were strengths
based, individualized and comprehensive, relationship based, family
focused, preventative, inclusive, culturally sensitive, and integrated.
The study also found that consultation could be effective in reaching
positive outcomes for children regardless of whether the consultation
was primarily individual-level consultation (i.e., by focusing on
an individual child with services such as assessment and screening,
providing direct service to an individual child or family, or making
referrals for service) or program-level consultation (i.e., working
with staff and management to address broad issues that effect more
than one child by training staff, working on classroom prevention
and intervention strategies, and selecting curricula). Importantly,
however, only the program-level consultation was also associated
with more positive perceptions of staff well-being, including staff
confidence in dealing with difficult behaviors, job satisfaction,
and emotional well-being.
Thus, as the study’s authors point out, programs that use
mental health professionals to provide program-level consultation
may be getting “more bang for their buck” than programs
providing more traditional, individual-level consultation.
The full Focal Point article includes
more detail about the study and its findings, as well as a list
of “do’s and don’ts” for integrating mental
health professionals into early childhood education programs. We
invite you to read the full article and to post your comments, opinions,
or reflections here.
- What do you think about the effectiveness of mental health
services provided in early childhood settings?
- What do you think are “best practices” for mental
health services in these settings?
- What sort of experiences—positive or negative—have
you had with mental health services in early childhood settings?
- What do you think of the study or its findings?
- Are the findings relevant to your situation? How might you
use them?
We look forward to hearing from you.
Janet S. Walker,
Web editor
Your thoughts…
Comments:
 Sorry, but what is mariburjeka?
Jane. Posted Thursday, March 20, 2008 by Unknown at 06:42 PM
MH Consultants: Does anyone know of a listserv for Mental Health Consultants to collaborate? I work with a Head Start program so would like to find such a group . . . but anything close would be great! Posted Monday, October 3, 2005 by SpittinRaisins at 08:24 PM
For the June 21 cost question: The costs did NOT necessarily rise to be in "high-high" quadrant. Programs in our study generally spent between 2% -4% of their budget on mental health programming, regardless of where they fell in our analysis. Fascinatingly, consultants who spent more time doing program-level work did more of each and every type of work activity we asked about. Being more a part of the team, integrated into the organization beyond serving particular families, boosted their efficient opportunities and activity level so they provided more services in the same amount of time. Some programs even in the "low low" quadrant were spending normally, they were inefficiently helping a handful of families with lots of therapy, presumably. Posted Tuesday, September 21, 2004 by Maria, an RTC proj. mgr. at 12:10 PM
For July 19 writer: Yes, if we are funded for the next five years, we plan to empirically test, with more rigorouse outcome measures, the effective mental health practices revealed in the present study summarized in "Getting Your Money's Worth: What Early Childhood Director's Should Know... We will test the training we developed in two large Head Starts, but as with this study, the results should be transferable to many early childhood care & education settings. Posted Tuesday, September 21, 2004 by Maria, RTC research project ma at 11:55 AM
I agree that the next step is to examine outcomes for families and children related to mental health consultant activities in Head Start and other early childhood programs. Do you have plans to do such research? Posted Monday, July 19, 2004 at 04:15 PM
The findings raise interesting theories, but more evidence is needed to link the activities and attitudes to outcomes (as opposed to outcomes as perceived by staff). I do find the findings plausible and the existing evidence does point to the need to explore the hypotheses further. Posted Sunday, June 27, 2004 at 10:33 AM
I am curious about the cost of being in the different quadrants in the figure. Presumably, it costs more to have high program and high individual level consulting-- so that method might be less efficient. Is there any information about the costs, especially about the costs of the two quadrants where there is only program or indivudual at the high level? Posted Monday, June 21, 2004 at 10:24 AM
This is a fascinating study and has implications for my own work. I have always thought that working with classroom teachers using the model you call program-level is an effective way to promote inclusion and better outcomes for all kids in the program. In my own experience, psychologists often seem to prefer the individual level work-- maybe it is more with the tradition of the field, maybe also it is easier or seems so to work with fewer kids rather than with the whole program. I would like to see training that focused on building ability of consultants to do program level work better. Posted Saturday, June 19, 2004 at 12:29 PM
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