Transcript for
Graduate discoveries in infant mental health
Rachael Wardle (00:00): In that child and their family’s lives, just reinforcing curiosity in that space, both with play and psychosocial factors to really understand where the parents are at, where other people in the house are at, and where the child is at. And then also remembering that that child doesn’t have a voice. So you have to be in there and advocate for them and their parents as well.
Narrator (00:24): Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.
Vicki Mansfield (00:30): Welcome to Emerging Minds podcast. I’m Vicki Mansfield, Practice Development Officer. Today’s my pleasure to talk with two social work student who’ve just completed their fourth year placement, working with infants and families. And we know from the 2020/2021 National Workforce Survey for parent, family and child mental health, that infant mental health capability was the lowest self-rated area of competence across all workforce groups. And the survey showed us that workers tended to feel more comfortable with traditional concepts of attachment. So from an adult or parent’s point of view, and rated their confidence in recognising emerging mental health issues in infants nought to two as the lowest score in the overall survey.
(01:17): I know from my practice discussions with clinicians that it’s important that we intentionally reflect on how to keep infants in mind across the disciplines, so we can promote a strong foundation for infants and toddlers in the first thousand days. So it’s great to talk with Megan and Rachael today who are at the start of their career and explore with them the discoveries they’ve made about infants and toddlers. New graduates are often well placed to bring fresh perspectives and conversations with them. Offer us opportunities to consider the how and why we practise in particular ways. Welcome Megan and welcome Rachael.
Rachael Wardle (01:56): Thank you.
Megan Coombes (01:57): Thanks.
Vicki Mansfield (01:57): Would you mind telling us why you chose to study social work? I’ll ask you first, Rachael.
Rachael Wardle (02:04): I guess my mom, she always had different caring roles growing up and then I think for my whole teen years she was a foster carer. We always had, whether it was long, permanent care or respite, that sort of was the foundation of it.
Vicki Mansfield (02:23): Awesome. And Megan, what about for you? What inspired you?
Megan Coombes (02:26): I started off doing another degree, doing a teaching degree and I was doing some work with kids who just come from a refugee background in tutoring and I just loved it and I thought I’d actually prefer to go down more of a community service career pathway. So changed over to social work and now I’m here.
Vicki Mansfield (02:43): Fantastic. What drew you to the program?
Rachael Wardle (02:47): My placement was at a parenting centre, and when I seen the email come through about the program, and it spoke about looking at the parent and infant relationship from the different perspectives, that was the biggest thing for me.
Vicki Mansfield (02:59): And Megan, what prompted you to apply and join the program?
Megan Coombes (03:02): I have an interest in working with vulnerable families or just an interest as well in general in children’s wellbeing and developments. I thought it would be a really good educational and training opportunities.
Vicki Mansfield (03:15): So do you think that this has given you an opportunity to learn a little bit more about infants and toddlers?
Megan Coombes (03:21): Oh yeah, a hundred percent. So I did my first placement in child protection at home care. So I think it gave me a bit more foundational work.
Vicki Mansfield (03:30): Great. And so the program that you undertook was a combination of two one line courses. One was keeping the infant infinite toddler in mind, and the second was the building blocks for social and emotional wellbeing. There was also a podcast, a webinar about play, and then the reflective discussions where we met as a group to talk through some of the concepts and explore how it was working in your replacement learning. So how do you think the courses helped you understand child mental health?
Megan Coombes (04:02): I personally think it helped me get a better understanding of how mental health plays into child’s development and play with the links a bit more. I don’t think it’s often, one of the forefront things that we kind of talk about or think about. So yeah, it really gave me a better understanding of play and how important and fundamental it is for child’s growth, mental health.
Rachael Wardle (04:24): That was a big thing, but also the psychosocial factors in that child and their family’s lives and just reinforcing curiosity in that space, both with play and psychosocial factors, just to really sort of understand where the parents are at, where other people in the house are at, and where the child is at. And then also remembering that that child doesn’t have a voice, so you have to be in there and advocate for them and their parents as well.
Vicki Mansfield (04:54): Do you think it’s been useful to have those discussions and learnings at the same time as meeting and seeing families in your placements?
Rachael Wardle (05:02): Yes. It’s just underlines the importance of it and sort of makes you think about it, I guess in a theoretical perspective, because you’re seeing it face to face in placement and you’re debriefing and having supervision but talking about it and discussing it with others like you and Megan, it’s been really helpful to get others’ perspectives than group supervision.
Megan Coombes (05:28): Yeah, I definitely agree. The supervision, the peer learning has been good because I think too others pick up on things that you kind of didn’t realise or it can be used as a way to validate that’s how you felt and stuff like that. But yeah, it can also just be a good place for more conversation around it to be happen and it encourages you to be curious and to think outside a kind of square and encourages to explore that relationship and be curious about those relationships a bit more.
Vicki Mansfield (05:59): The course is structured as a relationship-based framework that promotes mental health for infants and toddlers, and it has three interrelated positions, which are being an ally, being an advocate, and having an awareness of relationship. Ally being building an alliance with the family, being an advocate for the toddler and being aware of the relationship between parent and child. What did you learn about the three positions?
Rachael Wardle (06:26): As clinicians or practitioners you come in with knowing that you want to have a whole family approach, but thinking about it, that kind of breaks that down and gives you the different angles to come in on.
(06:39): So you are looking at different psychosocial factors, or different perspectives, or different development factors and how people can relate to each other and understand each other in the family. I think that was the biggest thing for me and just how that goes back to helping parents understand their children’s mental health.
(07:03): I guess the way that things like domestic violence, or drug use, or those big things can affect development or affect children’s mental health and can stunt that growth or stuff like that that I’d never really thought about. And it makes a lot of sense. But yeah, I hadn’t really thought about it before and I think a lot of parents haven’t thought about it either.
Vicki Mansfield (07:29): And it sounds, it’s comes back to that curiosity again when we’ve got that understanding of the theory, we can be curious or observe how that might be impacting a family or a child and respectfully explore that.
Megan Coombes (07:43): But I guess something for me too was the ally advocate relationship framework. It really encouraged you to explore what’s happening for the parent and for the child. So, I think it’s a really good relationship framework because it really encourages you to both look at the strengths, look at what’s going well, but also look at the worries and look at how we can be addressing them.
Vicki Mansfield (08:05): Absolutely. And I think that’s certainly that middle ground of being an ally and advocate.
Rachael Wardle (08:10): Yeah. Something that I definitely took away from placement in this sense is that children especially, but also parents and siblings are all social beings. We’re kind of like little sponges where we just absorb each other’s emotions. Explaining that to parents is a really good way to help them understand it.
Vicki Mansfield (08:29): In terms of the relationship based framework, that experience of pregnancy and transitioning to the postnatal period, because that’s a such a huge life change, was that part of your frame of reference for understanding infant mental health?
Megan Coombes (08:47): I had a bit of knowledge about the way that even though the baby’s in the room, they still feel stressed, they still feel a lot of the emotions that mom is experiencing. If mom is experiencing domestic violence, the baby would be feeling that stress and kind of that fear too.
Vicki Mansfield (09:02): In your placement and experience, you have parents that are fairly new into that transition of being parents, maybe for the first time. How was your sense of perinatal factors, changed or has there been anything that you think differently about?
Rachael Wardle (09:20): I spent a lot of time with a specific team that worked with new parents. I think just letting people know through the curiosity and being non-judgmental that you are going to see yourself and your partner, or your mom, or whoever’s in the house with you as very different. You’ll see them being silly, and see them being really playful and making faces that you might not have ever seen before, or noises that you might not have heard before, and you just got to really embrace that and go with it. And also giving people some psychoeducation around postnatal depression. I think that’s really important from all the perspectives of advocate ally and awareness of the relationship.
Vicki Mansfield (10:07): There can be a lot of stigma and a lot of silencing about mental health in general, but particularly the experience of becoming a parent. Often parents feel like they need to have it all together. Do you have any examples of observing play in your placement?
Rachael Wardle (10:25): I think play is a child or infant’s way to communicate. It’s basically their whole world at that age and it’s the way that they let you know how they’re feeling and where they’re up to and their development, following their lead. Because they’ll tell you when they’ve had enough and they’ll tell you when they want to play or want to change games.
Megan Coombes (10:46): I mean, prior to this course, I will be honest, I didn’t really think too much into what play meant for the child and I didn’t really pay too much attention to it. Didn’t really give it a lot of meaning. But after doing course, every time I do see a toddler playing now I’d like take an intense interest about how they’re actually playing with toys, what it is, or if it’s not a toy, why they want to get into a particular cupboard. I really have built my understanding about what play actually means for a child. And one example I can think of is when I’ve noticed that toddlers sometimes will get intense interest on this one particular thing.
(11:19): And it happened to be this time the toddler pushing the on and off button of the computer, which it made me think why was he so obsessed with pushing this. And another example I can think of is the water cooler. One of the little toddlers had this intense interest in the water cooler. Every time he saw it, he had to point it out to us. It was just like this amazing thing to him.
Vicki Mansfield (11:39): Part of the course was looking at brain development, and part of brain development in those early years is motor developments, their brains wiring and firing and they really love repetition because their brain wants them to do something over and over again.
(11:57): Parents or support workers, et cetera, social workers don’t necessarily want them to turn their computer on and off again, on and off again repetitively. But for littlies that repetition is their brain firings. And have you had any opportunity to share those noticings or wonderings with a parent?
Rachael Wardle (12:18): I definitely had the opportunity to do that on placement. Sometimes it is just pointing out the little things you say, “Oh look at that delight.” Or “Look at her looking at you, or watching you move to the kitchen and following you with a gaze.” You can see the joy that that brings the parent. But also pointing out when a child has made something a game. If they’ve rolled a ball to you and you roll it back, and they roll it back. It’s a game now.
Vicki Mansfield (12:49): A beautiful way of coming back to the infant. And that backwards and forwards turn taking in the games is early communication. It sounds like you can’t unsee play. So are you noticing and observing infants in the supermarket now?
Megan Coombes (13:06): Yeah, yeah. I definitely would say I am. And when you see a mom take the kid grocery shopping with them, I think that’s a really interesting thing to watch. Because parents often they’re there to do a specific thing, but kids are like, “This is a playland.” I think it’s definitely made me think of how toddlers and adults maybe doing that at the same place, but they’re having completely different experiences because of the way our brains work.
Vicki Mansfield (13:33): Yeah, absolutely. They’re an incredibly testing ground for parents patience. Okay. Because you on the edge of graduating and going into your career, is there anything that you have an interest in learning more about?
Megan Coombes (13:47): I have a bit more interest in the way that play has a role in parent and child relationships and just children growing in general. I’m working with mums who’ve experienced domestic and family violence and often they have kids. I went and did my own course with Emerging Minds about domestic violence and the impact on children. So it really pushed me to really want to learn about how to have some of these tough conversations. And often uncomfortable conversations too, because children don’t just passively witness or are exposed to domestic violence. They experience it as well.
Rachael Wardle (14:20): In placement I was privileged enough to be part of the behaviour clinic, which was all about children that were expressing themselves in a way that was concerning to the parent. And the parent would often say, “Oh, they have a behavioural issue.”
(14:37): But when you would look at the child and realise that they have high levels of anxiety and then you look at the parent, and the parent has high levels of anxiety and you go back to the sponge analogy and you think about how can the child regulate when they see their parent unable to regulate. And I just think that’s so interesting. So yeah, I think I definitely want to learn more about that space.
Vicki Mansfield (15:01): And if you were to talk to a colleague or a students coming through, what might you tell them that they might discover about infants and toddlers if they were to engage in this program or the online courses?
Rachael Wardle (15:18): That they’re like little agents, they know what’s going on. I think a lot of people might have a misconception that, “Oh, they don’t know or they don’t understand.” But they do know they’re soaking it all up and they know when mom or dad’s upset. So yeah, I think it goes back to being curious and non-judgemental, and having the skills to have those tough conversations and raise the awareness.
Vicki Mansfield (15:44): And we’re certainly developing a skills course in terms of infant mental health, which crosses over the intergenerational mental health as you’ve discussed, and the areas of working in family and domestic violence. But I think describing them as little agents is… Yeah, they’ve got agency.
Rachael Wardle (16:00): Yeah. They’re themselves and they may not have the words yet, but they definitely have the behaviour or the expressions coming through.
Megan Coombes (16:10): I really loved how Rachael described them as being agents because they definitely are. And I think often adults really shut down child’s understanding or experience of things go, “Oh, they’re too little, they just don’t understand. They don’t know what’s going on. They’re not being affected.” But that’s not true. Even if they don’t fully understand what’s going on, they’re still experiencing it and they have their own understanding of what’s going on. And I think the course really pushes you to think about that.
Vicki Mansfield (16:37): Thanks, that’s been really great to hear your reflections and to hear how it’s been to join in with the facilitated group as well.
Megan Coombes (16:48): I’m glad I did it because it’s really, I think helped me professionally develop some of those needed skills I’m going to need in those kind of contexts in this sector.
Rachael Wardle (16:55): Definitely couldn’t agree anymore with Megan. It’s been so helpful and so relevant. And just breaking the concepts down and shining light on the different perspectives, and really highlighting different things that we can think about and being able to bounce off each other. I think that’s a bit of a practical learner. I got more out of it by having it this way rather than just online because I think sometimes I do think a specific way or direction, and then when someone adds something in, I’m kind of like, “Oh, I’d never even considered that. Yeah, that’s a really good point.” And then that’s makes me shoot off in other directions as well.
Vicki Mansfield (17:34): That peer learning and bouncing off each other is really powerful.
Megan Coombes (17:37): I really enjoy the reflective practises and supervision because I guess in your sense, Vicki, you often challenged us or asked us questions that made us curious and think deeper about a particular situation, or about a particular scenario, or about just something in general in terms of an infant or something to do with the course. I think it made me think a little bit deeper about it. We were all kind of in a different placement setting, so I think we all had different experiences to bring to it, which helped build knowledge and different ways of thinking.
Vicki Mansfield (18:08): Yeah. Well, thank you so very much to both of you. It was great to hear your reflections and to share this learning with you. And I wish you both the very best going forward in your career.
Megan Coombes (18:22): Thank you.
Narrator (18:24): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.