Irdi - Methodology: An Educational Program for Children Mental Health Promotion in Nurseries

Abstract

"In an attempt to propose educational programs that can improve mental health of children since early childhood, a group of researchers created, in first place, the IRDI protocol, validated as a tool to predict psychic risk to child development in general. The IRDI protocol includes 31 indicators focusing on the baby-caregiver relationship in the first 18 months of life, based on the premise that the foundations for mental health are established in this period and are dependent upon the bodily, affective and symbolic relations of the caregiver-baby dyad. Then, as a continuation of the IRDI validation, new research was proposed: the “IRDI Methodology – a psychoanalysis-based intervention with nursery educators” sought to assess the IRDI as a tool for accompanying and promoting mental health in child education institutions, and also aiming to prevent further problems such as school exclusion due to mental disruptions. The methodology consisted of a follow up of 364 children distributed in 26 nurseries in São Paulo through IRDI indicators during 9 months at the nursery. Absent IRDIs were an indication of possible obstacles to a child’s psychic constitution. When some of the mental health indicators were absent, the researcher worked along with the nursery caregiver in order to turn the indicators into present indicators. This paper presents the validation of the IRDI Methodology, which was based on the comparison of the rate of “turned present indicators” with AP3 results, a tool for assessment of mental health problems at the age of three. As a result, the children who had “turned present indicators” showed significantly more positive mental health indicators at the age of three at AP3 than those who didn’t. It was verified that the on-the-job accompanying of nursery caregivers had a preventative effect on the possibility of children displaying both developmental problems and obstacles to their psychic constitution."