Infant Mental Health Awareness Week

Lisa Cameron Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mrs Murray; it is a pleasure to serve under the chairmanship of such an esteemed lady and parliamentarian, who is friendly to all.

I thank the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), and congratulate her on securing such a vital debate. Having worked all my life as a psychologist prior to coming to the House, I think it is fantastic that there are champions for this issue in this place, because setting the right foundation right across the United Kingdom and giving people opportunities to thrive from their earliest days is a fundamental premise for creating a healthy society. The right hon. Lady should never underestimate the value of the work she is doing in this House, not just today but for generations to come. I wish her all the best with her early years review, and will gratefully give any support that I can offer.

We also heard from the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), who spoke about the social care system for children and the particular plight of children in care, which goes back to the disorganised attachment styles that were mentioned. In fact, this debate has taken me right to my psychology days—I trained a long time ago—and Bowlby’s theory of attachment, which is the foundation for much of what we are speaking about today. It is so important that if a parent is not there, there is a trusted and secure caregiver. It does not have to be the mother. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, it is often the mother, but it can be the father or another trusted adult. The important thing is that there is a secure attachment.

The hon. Member for Twickenham was spot on when she spoke about why having disruption in early childhood—particularly for children who go into care settings—can have an adverse impact. We must make sure that trusted, secure and stable relationships are built and provided throughout every child’s life. That is vital, and we must support it.

The hon. Member also spoke eloquently about CAMHS support for infants and why it is so crucial. Helen Clark, a former MP who leads on the child mental health charter, is doing vital work on that through the charter with Play Therapy UK. There are many therapies that should be open and available to families with infants, including family therapy, behaviour therapy, which I used to do when I was practising many moons ago with very young children, and play therapy.

I will never forget the feeling of looking out of the window during covid when the council was opening up the playpark across the road from my house and seeing the children, including my own, running to it. There is something very therapeutic and nurturing about peer support and being able to play in a positive environment. I experienced that exact sentiment when I visited refugee centres in Lebanon. One of the most fundamental changes for those young children was the building of a playpark in the refugee centre. They were able to smile and laugh and play. Therapeutic involvement is vital, as is having natural environments that enhance wellbeing. I thank the hon. Member for Twickenham for her contribution.

The hon. Member for Strangford is an absolute stalwart of this issue and so many others in the House. He spoke about the impact of covid-19 on children’s development. There will have to be a lot of research done into that, because we may not see the full impact for years to come. Longitudinal studies will be needed to address that. We must all come together to ensure that funding, support and programmes are put in place so that children have every opportunity to catch up with the socialisation and education they have missed during this critical period.

The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) made an important contribution about gaps in service and maternal mental health. She also gave a shout-out for dads’ mental health, which is rarely mentioned but is so crucial. When I first came to the House, my husband took on many more of the activities I had usually done. The first week I came back from Parliament, I opened the fridge door and there were a whole host of Tupperware dishes in the fridge. I said, “What’s this? Where did it come from?” The neighbours had very kindly handed him food for himself and our children, because they assumed that they would be reliant on me and not him. I do not think he needed the food, because he stepped up to the mark, but it still shows that we cannot value fathers enough. They are all-round heroes when it comes to early childhood development.

The hon. Member also mentioned health visiting and face-to-face contact, which is extremely important. As chair of the all-party parliamentary health group, I know that face-to-face contact is vital for people. Particularly when they are speaking about mental health and wellbeing, they find it very difficult to do that over Zoom. They often do not bring it up at all in that format or over the phone. It is important that they have a personal relationship that is built up over time. The same can be said for GPs: it is vital that people can get back to seeing their GPs face to face, and we will be carrying out an inquiry into those issues.

I want to quickly mention adverse childhood experiences. I worked in and out of young offenders institutions and prisons for adults for a number of years, which involved visiting people because of their mental health issues and doing mental health assessments. Very few of the people I assessed after they had ended up in the criminal justice system did not speak of some trauma in childhood. The more we can do at the earliest stage, the better, in order to give people a path that will lead them to a fulfilling life. Early difficulties do not always lead to criminal justice problems, but there is a significant correlation, if not causation. We know the risk factors, and we must do all that we can. The British Psychological Society has highlighted that preschool children of parents with poor mental health are three times more likely than the general population to have mental health difficulties, so there is an intergenerational aspect, and we have to help with wellbeing more generally and across the lifespan for families.

Having come from being a psychologist to working as an MP, I see that we are not picking up young people who have autistic spectrum disorder or learning difficulties early enough. Those assessments can be done before they start school. The people who come to see me at my constituency surgery often tell me, “I have been saying for years and years that I need an assessment,” yet the waiting lists preclude that happening at the right time. Two years is a long time in the context of childhood development and the developmental milestones that children may not reach at the correct time because they do not have additional support to help them catch up, so we need to get early diagnosis through children and families hubs, or through community health services. As chair of the all-party parliamentary health group, I can say that this is an issue right across the UK, because I hear about it from people right across the UK. Parents are asking for help, and they need to have it.

Parenting programmes are vital. Our school system has become so dynamic that some of the things that we did when I was at school have been lost. Yesterday I spoke to a nutritionist, who told me that he is having to do a lot of work with parents on nutrition for infants. He said that some parents never undertook any kind of cooking at school—it was called home economics when I was there—and are blitzing McDonald’s to feed young infants. These are things that are fundamental for parenting support, and we need to make sure that we put them in place. We need access to paediatric care, including psychology and types of therapy such as play therapy, and we need parity between mental health and physical health. Looking at the wellbeing recovery from the covid pandemic will be key, and parenting programmes for parents who feel that they need a bit of extra support will be vital.

It would be lax of me not to quickly mention some of the work that the Scottish Government are doing. We have the baby box, which has been delivered to more than 200,000 families since 2017. It ensures that we in Scotland welcome every child, and that children have a basic provision for the first few months of their lives. We are saying very positively, “You’re welcome. We want to do our best for you throughout your life.” The Scottish Government also recognise the significant impact of the covid-19 pandemic and are doing work to address the issues that I have raised. We have the Best Start five-year plan for neonatal care, and perinatal and infant mental health programme boards have been set up. A number of increased payments and grants have been made too.

I concur with what I have heard in the debate, and I want to work wholeheartedly with everybody who is working in this vital area. It has been nice to be taken back such a long time—many decades—to my education as a psychology graduate and to Bowlby’s important theory of attachment. We should ensure that the work of Infant Mental Health Week is taken forward every week of the year, and especially that we hold infant mental health as a key issue in our work in Parliament.