Lincoln Program Spotlight: Early Childhood Mental Health Consultant (ECMHC)
Brooke Barnett, Psy.D
Clinical Manager - Early Childhood Mental Health Services
Ten years ago, I joined Lincoln's Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (ECMHC) program as a consultant. Lincoln's ECMHC program provides support for children, families, and early childhood educators within Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) preschools. The aim of mental health consultation is to help create learning environments that support children’s social-emotional health, while decreasing challenging classroom behaviors, and improving the ability of caregivers, teachers and systems to prevent, identify, treat, and reduce the impact of mental health problems in very young children.
When I first started at Lincoln, I worked in several preschool classrooms as a mental health consultant providing program and child-specific consultation. I observed caregivers and children experiencing various levels of chronic trauma, and many teachers experiencing significant burnout. It was apparent early on that these classrooms needed more support at multiple levels. After receiving some additional funding, we were able to add more classrooms to our program and expand our services to provide caregiver support groups, teacher education, and direct therapy services to families. Now I am the Clinical Manager and supervise all of our mental health consultants, as well as manage our contracts and grants.
Lincoln’s ECMHC program works with some of Lincoln’s youngest children, serving mainly 3-5-year-olds. The model is preventative, relationship-based, and culturally responsive. We focus on early identification and building resiliency within families and school communities. What I love about our program is that we have the opportunity to be creative in our approach; we can work in classrooms, facilitate parent and teacher support groups, and provide direct services like family therapy and therapeutic shadowing when needed. We have the ability to intervene at multiple levels within a child’s world, many times before more problematic mental health issues have become entrenched. Tom Meier, our ECMHC Board Ambassador, echoed the need for a program like this in the community, "Prevention and early intervention work are so important to me in my work life at Kaiser Permanente. Lincoln's work constantly looks at ways to disrupt cycles of poverty and trauma through interventions at the preschool level is close to my heart and drives my commitment to the organization." We're grateful to Tom for being an Early Childhood champion.
Like many nonprofit programs, we saw a funding cut due to COVID. Over the last two years, program funding was reduced by 15%. These already stressed systems and families are now battling additional burdens. Families are under a lot of financial stress, with parents needing to work while childcare centers closed. Right now, families need many tangible resources such as food, diapers, rental assistance, computers, and access to internet services. Lincoln has stepped up as much as possible, providing computers, diapers, and gift cards when possible. Still, some of these things are only temporary fixes, providing minor relief during uncertain times.
Despite many challenges this year, our program also had many successes. Throughout the year consultants participated in online classrooms, reading books related to social emotional awareness and resilience, and conducting social emotional lessons via zoom. In collaboration with teachers and families, one consultant developed relevant and visually engaging lessons using green screen technology to reach young learners that might otherwise struggle with engagement on Zoom. Each lesson included practical, social emotional skill building strategies while incorporating early childhood themes and best practices (such as establishing routines and consistency, supporting attachment and attunement, regulation techniques, and integrating mindfulness activities). These social-emotional lessons were met with enthusiasm by educators, children, and families. Our staff ran caregiver support groups that were very well attended, and even created a newsletter “Early Childhood Chats”. The newsletter features community resources, caregiver psychoeducation, caregiver self-care, and a suggested caregiver-child connection activity. Lincoln consultants worked creatively to develop this newsletter and used it as a source of reflective consultation with educators and families. The newsletter was translated into Spanish and Chinese, and Lincoln partnered with OUSD to have the letter sent out through a variety of platforms in order to reach as many caregivers as possible.
This year I was so impressed with how my staff were able to pivot and change directions to meet the needs of the children, families, and educators we serve. They've handled this challenge with a lot of creativity, humility, and grace, showing up as true leaders. When COVID caused schools to shift to remote learning, Lincoln consultants provided extensive case management for families, and partnered with OUSD leaders to think together about the impact school closures, and the pandemic as a whole was having on the mental health of young children.
When thinking about the future of our program, we hope to continue to provide mental health consultation; it's a unique service that only one other organization offers in OUSD. The benefits of mental health consultation are well documented, and far reaching with decreased problem behaviors and expulsion rates for preschoolers, improved social skills, increased access for families to mental health services, and reduction in teacher stress and turnover (read more here).
We also hope to expand our mental health consultation program in OUSD’s Special Education Preschool department. This would allow our staff to provide more consultation and direct service to an extremely vulnerable population, families with children diagnosed with various types of developmental delays and autism. Eventually, we would love to expand our team and have the capacity to provide consultation to in-home daycares, and to engage more families in child-parent psychotherapy.