If you or a loved need to safely detox from drugs or alcohol, contact Southern California Sunrise Recovery Center Today.
November’s Early Childhood Mental Health Awareness Month focuses on what skills infants through preschoolers need to learn to be emotionally and socially connected to their world. One way to measure this connection is by meeting certain milestones within their age group.
The major milestones essential to a child are:
Children who don’t meet their age-related milestones should contact their child’s pediatrician. Early mental health screening works as young children can exhibit clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, attention issues, or neurodevelopmental disorders such as receptive or expressive language or autism.
Although very young children can show characteristics of such disorders, they don’t process them as older kids, teens, or adults do. This makes it tougher for pediatricians to diagnose early childhood mental health issues. So it’s essential for parents to pay attention to even subtle changes in their child, such as how they play and relate to others.
Play is the work of a child. It’s pivotal to developing their world and their role in it. The play has cognitive, physical, emotional, and social benefits that can’t be learned in the same way elsewhere. It’s how children learn to interact with each other, developing an understanding of social expectations and rules by watching and emulating other children.
Early childhood play encourages children to explore how to use their senses, developing a sound foundation of healthy development and critical thinking skills. Play also reinforces short-term or working memory and teaches children that actions have consequences. For instance, if they take away a toy from another child, that other child may cry or get angry.
Babies tend to explore their world individually, while toddlers tend to parallel play. Preschoolers may still parallel play but interact more frequently with other children. All are learning how to explore, pretend, to create.
The development of healthy emotional expressions and problem-solving skills is critical for a young child’s self-regulation and mental health. Play helps reduce stress, and playing with others teaches children to control and empathize. But only some children have the opportunity to learn these lessons due to unhealthy or unsafe home environments.
Children that feel safe feel secure. Persistent stress due to unsafe environments can trigger mental health issues even early in childhood. A secure environment means feeling safe in relationships and having needs met. A child who is neglected doesn’t develop emotional, physical, or social milestones like a nurtured child.
Drugs, alcohol, and other trauma can impact early childhood development in ways that can last a lifetime.
When a parent suffers from substance abuse, the entire family, including very young children, is negatively impacted. Children under age five rapidly develop trust and self-initiative during this time of gaining relationship autonomy. It’s how they become functioning members of society as they progress through childhood and teen years. In fact, brain development continues until around age 25.
Parental alcohol and drug addiction hinders early childhood mental health development through mistrust, doubt, and guilt. In addition, alcohol and drug abuse can lead to psychological and physical abuse that imposes lifelong physical and emotional scars.
A child’s entire life trajectory can be altered by parental substance abuse as early as in the womb. Mothers who drink during pregnancy risk severe developmental problems that affect different children in different ways, from birth defects to behavioral issues, to fetal death. Fetal alcohol syndrome can cause brain damage and growth defects that are irreversible. These include the central nervous system and intellectual disabilities like cerebral palsy and mixed expressive, receptive language disorder.
Childhood trauma is formally defined as an event that a child finds overwhelmingly distressing or emotionally painful, often resulting in lasting mental or physical effects.
Children may be very resilient in the face of stress or life challenges, but serious adverse experiences can make it difficult for them to cope. Some develop lifelong mental health problems stemming from early childhood neglect and mental or physical trauma.
Early childhood trauma can affect a child’s brain structure and cognitive, social, and emotional development capacity. Learning to form relationships can be especially difficult when a child loses trust and confidence.
Very young children may feel too frightened to express how they are feeling, keeping emotions bottled up inside. They may fear separation from their loved ones, suffer from nightmares, scream and cry constantly, or lose weight from poor eating habits.
Children often have a hard time identifying and expressing their emotions. Parents can help their children express their emotions by teaching them to determine how they are feeling. Identifying emotions and feelings can help a child learn about positive mental health.
Some specific actions a parent can do to help their child better express their emotions in a positive and healthy way. Mental health services can help a child learn how to positively express their emotions.
Set boundaries for what is appropriate behavior and what is not regarding the expression of emotions. Healthy and safe expressions teach children how to deal with situations and their aftermath. Acting out uncontrollably can mean anything from fear to hunger to needing a nap.
All children display all sorts of behaviors that are part of their normal development. However, when acting out becomes extreme, when it happens frequently over time in various environments, professional support may be needed when parenting knowledge and skills don’t resolve the issues.
What remains is that parents are the best advocates for their children. Parents see how their children are reaching developmental milestones. They can intervene when they are not. Some parents need support from professionals like Southern California Sunrise Recovery Center when addiction impedes their children’s early childhood mental health journey.
This is what Early Childhood Mental Health Awareness Month is all about – giving children the best foundation for lifelong emotional, social, and physical health. Responding to their mental health needs early can circumvent mental health issues that don’t have to happen.
If you or a loved need to safely detox from drugs or alcohol, contact Southern California Sunrise Recovery Center Today.
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email michael@socalsunrise.com
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to michael@socalsunrise.com