One of the most important things that any society can do is to ensure every child receives the nurturing care they need to have the best possible start in life.

Securing early healthy relationships is the most efficient and cost-effective way of improving outcomes throughout a person’s life. The vision of The Promise - one of the reports produced from Scotland’s independent review of the care system - is that everyone involved in care services and systems is aware of the needs and rights of children and works to help families stay together in every case possible.

At NSPCC Scotland, with Infant Mental Health Awareness Week approaching (June 10-16, we want to reiterate our commitment to contributing to the fulfilment of this vision wherever we can. Infants remain a large proportion of the children who enter the care system in Scotland. It is vital to keep a focus on their needs and rights as work to implement the Promise progresses.

For young children who are placed away from home, trauma and placement instability can leave a lasting imprint on their lives unless intervention is early, and evidence based.

The Promise is also clear about the harm caused by poverty and how it increases the chances of children being involved with the care system, acknowledging that it is the Government’s responsibility to make sure children have their basic needs met. Support for infants and carers must be holistic and address both the material and therapeutic needs of a family and take into account exclusion and isolation caused by having no money. The combination of poverty, accumulated stress, disadvantage and trauma can lead to poor outcomes for children.

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The Scottish Government has prioritised parents with babies under one in national action to reduce child poverty in Scotland. This is welcome but we must do more. Investing to prepare and support new parents to form strong healthy attachments with their baby is a fundamental building block in reducing adversity in early childhood.

This will require a shared multi-agency focus on improving outcomes for vulnerable children from pre-birth and a renewed focus on preventative practice and services and intervention in the earliest stages of life. Better alignment of governance and accountability structures across justice, health, education, and the voluntary sector can enable a more equitable deployment of resources across the system, to get the right help to families at the right time.

While there is no single policy that will deliver the Promise, many decades of evidence show that investing in the social and emotional health of babies (infant mental health) sets the foundations for competencies and abilities that enable a person to thrive throughout life.

This includes our ability to learn, form lasting relationships, cope with adversity, problem solve, control impulses and manage emotions. Delivering this type of support in the community makes a significant difference to the health and education outcomes of the most marginalised families. There is a common misconception that the term infant mental health refers to babies having diagnosable disorders. However, the term is used to make infants’ subjective experience more visible, and to help people think about a baby’s mental health, as they would physical health.

Being mentally healthy involves understanding and managing emotions, experiencing nurturing and meaningful relationships and being able to explore, play and learn in age- and developmentally appropriate ways.

Babies need adults in their lives to support elements of mental health, such as emotional regulation. Cognitive and language development is also inextricably linked to mental health. As a child grows their language skills this will support their ability to recognise and describe their emotions.

By prioritising early relationships in its overarching purpose, the Scottish Government can steer caregivers, practitioners, and decision makers to understand the importance of the quality of children’s relationships, so that over time we redesign the system to prioritise early relational health.

There has never been a better time to commit to the transformational change required to improve the national response to infants at risk. In Scotland, we are seeing real innovation in the development of infant mental health services that can drive the long-desired shift towards prevention. The next phase of care system reform, Promise Plan 2024-2030, should support integrated local systems that enable high-quality attachment relationships between the infant and a safe carer.

Infant mental health teams are developing across the country national training for all professionals, under-graduate and post graduate courses in foundations in infant mental health are being rolled out, and a Scottish Centre for Expertise in this field is currently under development. The materials, skills and resources to improve the care response to infants and their families do exist.

The Herald: The Scottish Government has prioritised parents with babies under one in national action to reduce child poverty in ScotlandThe Scottish Government has prioritised parents with babies under one in national action to reduce child poverty in Scotland (Image: Getty)

Plan 24-30 can harness this knowledge and experience, to ensure that the policy and practice changes are fully in-tune with the needs and rights of our most vulnerable citizens. A critical first step will be ensuring that the review of the Children’s Hearings System enables an infant-aware justice system that can make decisions according to the developmental needs of very young children, within a structured timescale.

We now have overwhelming evidence that supporting mental health in early childhood improves later outcomes and generates future savings, but we must also recognise that babies and young children have a right to the best possible mental health, just as older children and adults do.

If we are serious about improving outcomes in a context of diminishing resources, as well as upholding the rights of our most vulnerable citizens, then babies’ social and emotional wellbeing must become our number one investment priority to ensure all of Scotland’s children are thriving now, and in the future.

Joanne Smith is Policy and Public Affairs Manager at NSPCC Scotland where she leads the organisation’s work around relational health across ages and stages, child development and trauma prevention in infancy.