Recap: Asset Mapping for the Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Workforce
May 20, 2025
A too-often overlooked but absolutely essential subject drew a dedicated in-person and online audience to the Boston Foundation’s forum on May 20 to explore the workforce involved in infant and early childhood mental health.
As researchers presented and panelists conversed, it became clear that that workforce includes literally everyone who comes in contact with families and young children. The need to raise awareness about infant mental health covers the full breadth of this workforce, but for those whose work is explicitly dedicated to it, the needs are deeper and more systemic.
TBF’s Danubia Camargos Silva welcomed the audience and introduced Aditi Subramaniam from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCC). Starting with the declaration that “together we are stronger than the Executive Orders,” she outlined the frame of the research, which looked at three aspects of mental health: promotion, prevention, and intervention/treatment. Then she turned it over to BU researchers to present both quantitative and qualitative findings.
Jenny Zhang described results of a survey of 91 providers and shared an interactive map depicting findings that reveal regional gaps in service, and uneven distribution across prevention/promotion and intervention. There’s a strong desire for professional development in the field, but barriers make it difficult—especially affordability, but also accessibility, both geographic and temporal.
Alicia Mendez shared analysis of interviews the researchers conducted with providers. Most interviewees were White women in supervisory roles and researchers acknowledged that while that offered a specificity of findings, further research across more diverse demographics is needed for added breadth, including more “tangential” roles in law or medicine. Interviewees discussed the workforce’s strengths, needs, and system needs, and focused on the practice of reflective supervision within relationship-based organizations. In brief:
Strengths: Reflective supervision, which is a collaborative professional development approach that supports early childhood professionals in understanding their own thoughts and feelings and how these affect their work with children and families, is happening and training is offered; there is intentionality around hiring people with lived experience similar to clients.
Needs: More reflective supervision. Research shows the practice promotes self-awareness, enhances problem-solving skills, and strengthens relationships, ultimately leading to improved outcomes for families. However, the practice isn’t universal, and training varies; “We need to go back to basics.” Also needed is support for workers with their own trauma experience having to revisit that in serving others.
System needs: More people! To get and keep good people, you have to pay them. “To do a hard job that is emotionally taxing, and working closely with families in different environments, it has to pay better than Target.” Also, greater racial and cultural awareness at all levels (e.g., funders, board); an emphasis on prevention; and, even though Massachusetts is a leader in this, further integration of systems across the Commonwealth.
Agenda
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Danubia Camargos Silva, Senior Program Officer, Child Well-Being, The Boston Foundation
Research Presentation
Aditi Subramaniam, Director of IECMH Policy, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
Dr. Alicia Mendez, Research Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, Boston University
Jenny Zhang, Research Assistant, Boston University
Panel Discussion
Meghan Adams Siembor, Division Director, Child & Family Services, Community Teamwork
Dr. Funmi Aguocha, Assistant Commissioner, Office of Behavioral Health Promotion and Prevention, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health
Andrea Goncalves Oliveira, IECMH Statewide Policy and Initiatives Lead, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health
Christy Moulin, Director, Center for Early Childhood, The Home for Little Wanderers
Aditi Subramaniam, Director of IECMH Policy, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (moderator)
Closing Remarks
Dr. Ruth Paris, Professor, School of Social Work, Boston University; Institute for Early Childhood Wellbeing
Subramaniam returned to moderate a panel of leaders in the field of early childhood mental health. Panelists discussed the difficulty of the work itself, and the difficulty of getting people to stay in the field when the material rewards are so scarce. This shortage means, as Andrea Goncalves Oliveira from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health noted, “Work on prevention or intervention typically happens with older kids. But imagine the potential to reach people earlier, like when they have a newborn and are craving support.”
Late intervention exacerbates problems. “If we don’t get to young people early, we’ll have more to do,” said Funmi Aguocha from the Commonwealth’s Office of Behavioral and Mental Health Promotion. She explained how her department started during the opioid pandemic in 2014, and looking at root causes found little or no spending going to prevention. Her commission, mandated in 2022, operates on a socioecological model at the intersection between government, community, family, and individuals. “Rather than pulling people out of the river downstream, we need to figure out why they are falling into the river in the first place, and help them not fall in. Imagine a Commonwealth where our residents thrive. What’s necessary to do that?”
People, of course. Community Teamwork’s Meghan Adams Siembor said, “We can do all the training in the world but if our workers aren’t able to implement, practice, and reflect… it won’t take. We have to find a way to institutionalize and make reflective supervision part of everything. Turnover is hard. To have enough coverage in the classroom, we need double the staff we’re used to, to enable people to come out of class and practice reflective supervision.” And representing New England Home for Little Wanderers, Christy Moulin’s observations reinforced that challenge: “As program leader, I have to build around the reality that in our relational field, people aren’t going to stay. Workers move on after two years or so.”
Subramaniam asked, “Given current climate, what would be a North Star in this work?” Goncalves Oliveira summed up what many had said: “A wish to see that a family, no matter where they go for services, is always interacted with in a similar fashion by people who’ve been trained in issues of childhood, families, and trauma… so that their experience is supportive. We need to incentivize people to stay in this work.”
Subramaniam closed the panel acknowledging, “This is hard work and heart work. But we should follow the tradition of the Masai, whose greeting to one another is, ‘How are the babies?’ If the babies are well, we as a society are well.”
After an engaged audience Q&A, Professor Ruth Paris closed the forum with remarks reflecting her perspective of years in the field, emphasizing the dominating role of substance use and the need for refined training. And urgency. She left the audience with a quote from Chilean Nobel-winning poet Gabriela Mistral:
“Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his senses developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.”
