Educating & Advocating on Behalf of Texas Babies

The Texas Association for Infant Mental Health (TAIMH) is a non-profit affiliate of the World Association for Infant Mental Health. TAIMH has addressed infant mental health issues in Texas since 1980, and is dedicated to improving the quality of nurturing family relationships for infants, young children and their families.

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  • Tackling Childhood Disabilities Through Environment

    The United States government would get a better bang for its health-care buck in managing the country’s most prevalent childhood disabilities if it invested more in eliminating socio-environmental risk factors than in developing medicines. That’s the key conclusion of Prevention of Disability in Children: Elevating the Role of Environment, a new paper co-authored by a Simon Fraser University researcher. The paper is in the
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  • A Poverty Solution That Starts With a Hug

    PERHAPS the most widespread peril children face isn’t guns, swimming pools or speeding cars. Rather, scientists are suggesting that it may be “toxic stress” early in life, or even before birth. This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics is issuing a landmark warning that this toxic stress can harm children for life. I’m as skeptical as anyone of headlines from new medical studies (Coffee
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  • Love Key to Brain Development in Children

    Ever noticed how scientific opinions swing from one extreme to the other? Take the importance of mothers in the development of children. In the early days of psychiatry almost every mental illness, from depression to schizophrenia to autism was blamed on bad mothering. Then in the 1960’s and 70’s the discovery of medications that helped these illnesses allowed psychiatry to reframe them as biological
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  • Benefits of high quality child care persist 30 years later

    Adults who participated in a high quality early childhood education program in the 1970s are still benefitting from their early experiences in a variety of ways, according to a new study. The study provides new data from the long-running, highly regarded Abecedarian Project, which is led by the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Researchers have followed
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  • 1.2 Million Texas Children Still Without Insurance

    More than 1 million Texas children remain without health insurance, and those kids are not getting the care they need. The startling condition of the state’s children came into vivid focus last week with the release of the annual Kids Count survey. The analysis of official state and federal data by the non-partisan Center for Public Policy Priorities found that 1.2 million Texas children have
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  • Autism signs appear in baby’s brains as early as 6 months

    The early signs of autism are visible in the brains of 6-month-old infants, a new study finds, suggesting that future treatments could be given at this time, to lessen the impact of the disorder on children. Researchers looked at how the brain develops in early life, and found that tracts of white matter that connect different regions of the brain didn’t form as quickly
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  • Infant/Toddler Early Learning Guidelines are Coming to Texas!

    What should Infants and Toddlers know and be able to do?  The question itself is difficult to comprehend, although 33 states have asked and answered it already, and Texas is currently on its way!  The Texas Early Learning Council is working with the National Infant and Toddler Child Care Initiative at Zero to Three and a broad group of Texas-based stakeholders, including Sarah Crockett
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  • Exposure to Violence in Children Harms DNA, Study Says

    Children who are exposed to violence experience wear and tear to their DNA that is similar to that seen in aging, according to a new study that may help explain why they face a heightened risk of mental and physical disorders as adults. In a long-term study of 118 pairs of identical twins, researchers at Duke University found that boys and girls who had
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  • Are Pre-K Programs About To Get Gutted?

    When a little girl, who I’ll call Tina, arrived in a pre-kindergarten program in Washington, D.C. she was unable to recognize any sounds or letters.  By the time she left for kindergarten she knew all her letters and more sounds than D.C.’s standards require. Now, six years later, Tina’s teachers say she’s “on a roll” in school. There are plenty of legitimate debates about
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