Outline of Michigan Michigan State Profile

 

Michigan has chosen to provide support to child care providers and families through mental health consultation, rather than general child care health consultation. To this end, state leaders are committed to developing a comprehensive, culturally competent training system for early childhood mental health consultants, and to expanding the state’s capacity to provide child care programs with access to early childhood mental health consultation services through the Child Care Expulsion Prevention (CCEP) projects.

  • Licensing: Michigan licensing regulations do not require child care health consultation.
  • Funding: Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) dollars from the Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) fund the Department of Community Health (DCH) to administer 16 mental health-focused CCEP projects.
  • Auspices: Child care mental health consultants (CCMHCs) work from the CCEP projects. Community mental health agencies partner with local/regional Michigan Community Coordinated Child Care (4C) Association offices—the state’s child care resource and referral agencies (CCR&Rs)—and with Michigan State University Extension to implement these projects.
  • CCMHC Role: CCMHCs work with parents and child care providers caring for children ages 0–5, who are experiencing behavioral or emotional challenges that put them at risk for expulsion from child care.
  • CCMHC Training: CCMHCs are clinicians with at least a master’s degree and experience working with young children.

History and Development

Since 1998, Michigan has invested in strengthening links between the child care community and Community Mental Health Services Programs through the CCEP Initiative. Currently, there are 16 CCEP projects, funded through the Michigan Department of Human Services and administered by the Michigan Department of Community Health in collaboration with the 4C Association (the state CCR&R) and Michigan State University Extension.

CCEP aims to reduce expulsions, improve the social-emotional quality of care, and increase the number of parents and providers who successfully nurture the social–emotional development of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. CCEP projects serve licensed child day care centers, licensed group day care homes, registered family day care homes, day care aides, and relative care providers.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

  • Securing Sufficient Resources to Expand Statewide: There is an ever-increasing demand for early childhood mental health consultation in child care settings, accompanied by a growing need for intensive training for new consultants in this new field. In response, Michigan is striving to identify new funding streams to support the expansion of a qualified CCMHC pool.
  • Accessing and Engaging Providers: Accessing family and group home providers, relative providers, and in-home day care aides is more difficult than reaching center-based providers. And, it is challenging to get providers of all types to identify children with social-emotional concerns when they are infants and toddlers, rather than waiting until they are 3–5 years old. Over time, however, providers become more adept at referring younger children.

Ingredients for Success

  • Programmatic and Child-Family Consultation: Using evidence-based tools and strategies in relationship-based practice, CCEP consultants employ a holistic approach to consultation. This approach reduces child care expulsions while enhancing parent-child, parent-provider, and provider-child relationships.
  • Highly Qualified Consultants: CCEP consultants are master’s-level early childhood mental health specialists who are required to participate in ongoing professional development activities, including reflective supervision and high-quality training and technical assistance (TA). Consultants are encouraged to obtain the Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health Endorsement for Culturally-Sensitive, Relationship-Based Practice Promoting Infant Mental Health.
  • Collaborative Relationships: CCEP state and local partners have formed solid collaborative relationships to support and promote CCEP. One result of this collaboration is that training on promoting social-emotional competence is being expanded, improved, and coordinated among the main state-level entities that are responsible for the professional development of child care providers: CCEP, the Michigan 4C Association, the Michigan Better Kid Care Project (Michigan State University Extension), and the Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.

Moving Forward

  • Expanding the Number of Sites in Which CCEP is Available: State partners will work to coordinate training approaches, professional competencies, and a vision of social emotional health across early childhood systems and supporting entities such as CCR&Rs and the Michigan Association of Infant Mental Health.
  • Ongoing Improvement: A team from Michigan State University initiated a comprehensive evaluation of the CCEP Initiative in March 2007 with funding provided by the Michigan Department of Human Services.

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Information as of August 2007