A Research On Infant Mental Health

In recent years, both domestic and western researchers have paid more and more attention to the mental health of infants ranging from 0 to 6 years old , and they also did a lot of researches on it. But these researches, especially domestic researches, were mostly focused on the importance of infant mental health education and how to give infant mental health education and how to do the intervention. There has been some assessment instruments of infant mental health in China, but some of the instruments are only used to assess one aspect or a few aspects of mental health, some of the instruments are revised from existing instruments which were developed by foreign researchers, they can't meet the need for the development of infant mental health in our country, and they can't reflect the problems which are based on the situation of our country either. Because the mental health and its criterion are related to the culture, it is necessary to develop a scale of mental health according to the traits of infant which are based on the situation of our country.In this research, we first integrated former researches, then we constructed the frame of the questionnaire of infant mental health. We divided infant mental health into four aspects: cognition, emotion, behavior, sociality. After the questionnaire was developed, we administrated it in the kindergartens of Shanghai, the subjects are infants ranging from 2 to 6 years old. The results illustrated that,1 The reliability and validity of the instrument were very ideal.2 The state of infant mental health were improved when they were growing up, especially from 5 to 6 years old. These four aspects of mental health reflected different tendencies.3 There were significant differences between girls and boys on these aspects: cognition , emotion and total scores, girls were healthier than boys.According to the results, we constructed a grade norm of infant mental health, they were divided into four grades. This scale could be used as a screening instrument of infant mental health.