Key takeaways:
- The United States faces a youth mental health crisis that affects children as young as infants and toddlers; 1 in 10 children under the age of 5 suffer from some form of mental health issue.
- Head Start is a crucial program for low-income families that offers home visiting, mental health support, and early intervention services, alongside high-quality early education.
- Head Start serves as an effective model for supporting the mental health needs of children and their families because of its multigenerational approach.
- Head Start should be fully funded to serve all eligible families and provide additional resources to support early educators, therapists, and early intervention specialists, while also promoting public awareness of the youth mental health crisis.
Introduction and summary
The United States faces a severe mental health crisis, and young children’s well-being is at risk. Recent research reveals increasing reports of sadness and hopelessness, major depressive episodes, and even hospitalizations among children and adolescents.1 Depression is also more commonly reported in households living in poverty.2 Early intervention has profound impacts on children’s outcomes. Research has shown that preventing adverse childhood experiences, including material hardship, abuse, or neglect, can reduce, among high school students, nearly 90 percent of suicide attempts, 84 percent of instances of prescription medication abuse, and 64 percent of feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness.3
Early childhood mental health is crucial, affecting lifelong social, emotional, and physical well-being.4 The early years are a prime opportunity for intervention to prevent the disabilities and poor life outcomes most attributable to mental health challenges.5 Brains develop rapidly in early childhood and are directly shaped by the experiences and resources made available to them.6 Given their sensitivity during early development, infants and young children are among the most vulnerable—and frequently overlooked—demographics at risk of mental health challenges. At least 1 in 10 children under the age of 5 are estimated to suffer from some form of mental health issue, but the symptoms associated with their struggles are often not well understood.7 And despite the prevalence of mental health challenges among young children, and the consequences for their development if these challenges are left unaddressed, most states struggle to meet the demand for mental health services.8 Nationwide, 70 percent of counties in 2020 had no child psychiatrists, and children living in lower-income counties were far less likely to have access to any kind of mental health professional.9
Head Start, which serves children ages 3 and 4, and Early Head Start, the companion program for expectant parents, infants, and toddlers, serve as among the most valuable federal programs for low-income families, strengthening protective factors that reduce risks and providing mental health support to parents and their children. But despite its proven benefits, Head Start has historically been underfunded and is only able to provide services to a fraction of eligible families.10 Addressing the mental health crisis and ensuring that the nation’s youngest children receive the strongest possible start are of crucial importance for long-term health and quality of life.11 As Head Start is a key mental health support for the nation’s most vulnerable families, protecting and expanding support for the program is critical to combatting the crisis and protecting children.
Addressing the mental health crisis and ensuring that the nation’s youngest children receive the strongest possible start are of crucial importance for long-term health and quality of life.
Young children experience mental health challenges
Infants and young children are often excluded from conversations about mental health because the symptoms of mental health challenges at very young ages can sometimes be difficult to recognize or are easily overlooked. Children have complex psychological lives that are shaped by their experience of the world around them; early development is a crucial time for children to learn how to understand, manage, and organize their emotional responses and build relationships with other people that help to shape all subsequent development and learning.12
As Head Start is a key mental health support for the nation’s most vulnerable families, protecting the program is critical to combatting the crisis and protecting children.
Signs and symptoms of mental health challenges in young children
Common mental health conditions in school-aged children include anxiety, depression, and behavioral disorders.13 In infants and toddlers, mental health issues often appear as trouble understanding and controlling emotions or behavioral outbursts such as anger, aggression, or excessive crying, all of which affect social engagement.14 Infants might show fussiness, sleep difficulties, anxiety around strangers, feeding problems, or developmental delays.15 Anxiety can manifest as clinginess, developmental backsliding, or fears about specific activities or things, such as riding in the car or getting in an elevator.16 Depression can manifest as listlessness, a loss of interest in normal activities, including playtime, and regressions in eating or sleeping habits.17 Recognizing that most mental health challenges begin early18 is vital for early intervention and comprehensive family supportto improve overall well-being and set children on a trajectory for healthy psychological outcomes.
Children are deeply affected by their circumstances: Material deprivation, parental stress, exposure to violence in the community, and instability in the home or care environment are examples of adverse childhood experiences and can all have meaningful impacts on children’s outcomes well into adulthood.19 Black, Asian American, Latino, and Indigenous children endure structural racism, which reduces opportunities for crucial early experiences that help shape positive development and increases exposure to harmful impacts such as poor health, higher rates of punitive discipline in school settings, and significant economic disparities.20
Recent research21 has shown that children bear the brunt of a “chain reaction of hardship.”22 Material deprivation, such as struggling to afford food, utilities, and other basic necessities, causes emotional distress in parents and caregivers, including higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression.23 These disturbances are, in turn, associated with higher rates of distress in their young children, which can have longer-term impacts on their cognitive, motor, language, and social-emotional development. In June 2025, more than one-third of parents reported experiencing at least one form of material hardship, and by August 2025, that number rose to 56 percent.24 Child care precarity—uncertainty associated with being able to find or afford reliable child care—is associated with parental anxiety and distress, which, in turn, has negative impacts on children’s mental well-being.25
Despite the fact that 10 percent to 15 percent of young children experience some form of mental health challenge,26 including post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, a lack of public awareness about the developmental needs of young children continues to limit efforts to address the crisis.27 Securely attached children, who can form healthy, responsive relationships with people around them, tend to experience more positive relationships overall, show stronger self-esteem, and demonstrate better problem-solving skills.28 By contrast, children who regularly endure hardship are at risk for lifelong negative mental and physical health outcomes. Housing insecurity, for example, is associated with increased risk for developmental delay, and associated disruptions to nutrition and sleep quality have consequences for cognitive and behavioral well-being.29
Access to mental health treatment varies widely by race and ethnicity. Asian American youth face the most pronounced challenges to accessing mental health services:30 More than 70 percent of Asian youth have unmet mental health needs compared with 31 percent of non-Hispanic white youth.31 Access to mental health care is also higher among non-Hispanic white children (17.7 percent) than their Black (8.7 percent) and Hispanic peers (9.2 percent).32 For the most vulnerable families,33 Head Start programs serve as a crucial lifeline, both to early education opportunities and to mental health and other family support.
Promoting mental health through Head Start
In its 60-year history, the Head Start program has served nearly 40 million young children—the majority of whose families live in poverty.34 Across more than 3,300 programs, Head Start and Early Head Start served nearly 800,000 children in 2024 alone.35 Early Head Start served nearly 218,000 children in 2024, and provided prenatal care to an estimated 12,000 expectant parents.36 Notably, Head Start includes categorical eligibility for some of the most vulnerable families, including those enduring homelessness, children in foster care, and families with low incomes. Services beginning during pregnancy help offer protection to children leading up to birth. Offering mental health services to parents during pregnancy helps boost kids’ outcomes even after birth. Reducing stress during the perinatal period has measurable positive impacts on kids’ cognitive and behavioral development. Research shows that mental health support for expectant parents benefits both parents and children,37 with measurable and lasting effects on children’s behavioral health after birth.38 Psychological distress during pregnancy can affect maternal stress hormones and increase inflammatory responses in the body that can have adverse effects on children’s developing brains.39 Research also shows that child mental health disorders are predictive of a range of negative adult health outcomes.40
Head Start plays a unique role in supporting mental health among Tribal communities
A long history of the U.S. government stripping Tribal communities of their traditions, language, and holistic approaches to mental wellness has left many still reeling with trauma.41 Residential boarding schools, cultural genocide, lack of land acknowledgement, and forced assimilation have had devastating impacts on these communities.42 As a result, though specific data are scarce, rates of mental health challenges among children from Tribal communities are of significant concern.43
Head Start provides high-quality child care and parental support for American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities, tailored to local needs. AIAN programs emphasize language revitalization44 and traditional cultural practices, which local leaders report are vital for children’s mental well-being, self-identity, and social-emotional skills.45 Head Start performance review standards are adapted for AIAN programs, and the programs rely on Tribal communities to identify a knowledgeable expert who can satisfy the curricular requirements through their expertise in Indigenous culture and language.46 Traditional cultural views heavily influence the ways in which Indigenous communities view mental health and healing;47 Head Start’s local flexibility allows programs to receive necessary federal funding to support and deliver services in ways that best suit the needs of the community, while prioritizing the preservation of valuable traditional practices.
Head Start and Early Head Start programs provide a crucial foundation for vulnerable families to support their children’s development, learning, and mental well-being through mental health consultations,48 partnerships with mental health providers,49 and child screenings and assessments,50 which many of these families may not otherwise be able to access. Connecting with a mental health professional also helps parents learn how to identify and address psychological distress in their children, along with other factors that may affect their mental well-being such as chronic medical conditions and adverse early experiences.51 Professionals help parents adopt healthy and responsive techniques for addressing challenging behavior in their children, including positive reinforcement, and conduct early developmental screenings to help families understand whether their children may eventually need additional support for developmental delays or disabilities.52 Early mental health intervention helps to reduce children’s behavioral problems, alleviate symptoms of anxiety and depression in both parents and their children, prevent child abuse and neglect, and improve children’s long-term academic, physical, and social outcomes.53 Head Start helps to reduce barriers to receiving such care and serves as a community hub for parents to access material support and health and parenting tools, alongside early care and education.
Head Start serves as an effective model for how to address the youth mental health crisis because of its holistic, multigenerational approach to supporting both children and their families and mitigating adverse early experiences known to be detrimental to children’s well-being.54 It offers comprehensive, high-quality child care,55 home visiting,56 child developmental screenings,57 nutrition assistance,58 parenting support,59 and mental health services.60 Head Start programs can be offered in schools, homes, and centers,61 and their local policy councils are instrumental for engaging the community and giving parents a voice in the administration of the program and its curriculum.62 Families frequently form close bonds with their Head Start home visiting professionals, who help improve parents’ knowledge of their children’s development and support healthy parenting relationships.63
Early Head Start provides crucial supports to families of children with disabilities
After funding disruptions to Head Start early in the year, including frozen grants that temporarily forced the closure of multiple programs in Washington state, Gricelda Valenzuela feared that her son, who was born with Down syndrome, would lose access to crucial services that have supported his development.64 Valenzuela told The 74 that Head Start gave her access to a home visitor, who worked with her son to support his early education, sensory and fine motor skills, and socialization. Nearly 1 in 5 residents in her community lives in poverty and qualifies for support through Head Start;65 the uncertainty around the future of the program has meaningful consequences for their well-being.
The loss of Head Start programs is felt most acutely in rural parts of the country—as well as for families of children with disabilities, like Valenzuela’s—who, without the program, frequently lack access to similar services elsewhere in their communities. The child care crisis disproportionately affects children with disabilities,66 since private programs may not have the educator training or facilities to support disabled children’s needs—or they may elect to decline to serve disabled children.67 Head Start programs, meanwhile, are required by federal statute to reserve at least 10 percent of their funded slots for children with disabilities, guaranteeing these children care,68 including early identification of developmental delays or diagnosable disabilities and additional services such as parenting supports, mental health support, early intervention, and special education services. For families like Valenzuela’s, Head Start may be one of the few places they can receive comprehensive support. With uncertainty around Head Start’s future,69 amid unprecedented attacks against its funding, staff, and administration,70 “the last three months have left providers, educators, parents and staff scrambling and afraid.”71
Recommendations for Head Start
Given the important ways Head Start promotes family economic stability, increases access to physical and mental health services, and creates communities of care that center the needs of local families, policymakers should use its framework as a model for supporting youth mental well-being and more broadly addressing the mental health crisis. But despite its valuable role, Head Start lacks adequate resources to meet its mandate, and a widespread workforce shortage in the early childhood field undercuts its ability to extend the services vulnerable families need to support their children. In order to scale the Head Start program to address the mental health crisis among low-income families, policymakers should take the following steps.
1. Provide the funding necessary for Head Start to meet the needs of all eligible children
Head Start has never in its history been fully funded to extend services to all eligible families and their children: Just 1 in 4 eligible children are enrolled in the program,72 and only an estimated 10 percent of eligible participants received Early Head Start services.73 But even with these limitations, Head Start has proven benefits for participating families.74 Particularly as other services that vulnerable families depend on begin to see the impacts of recent congressional cuts,75 Head Start will play an increasingly important role in ensuring children receive adequate physical and mental health care, nutrition, and early learning. Families in rural communities, in particular, already face unique challenges accessing care for mental, behavioral, and developmental disorders for their children.76 With massive cuts to Medicaid unfolding in the coming years,77 rural hospital networks will be particularly hard hit.78 And Head Start is already a crucial support program for these families: In many rural parts of the country, were it not for a Head Start program, families would have no licensed care options at all.79 Without congressional action, Head Start will continue to struggle to provide services to families who need them most. During periods of flat funding, including under a congressional continuing resolution, or suspensions to funding, such as during a government shutdown, Head Start programs face more immediate and pronounced funding gaps that disrupt their ability to serve their communities.
2. Strengthen professional pathways to recruit and support Head Start staff
A 2024 information memorandum issued by the Administration for Children and Families,80 which oversees Head Start, included new and expanded strategies for increasing mental health promotion, including increasing parental awareness about the importance of postpartum care, helping families understand their child’s development, and creating spaces to identify and address potential stressors that affect family and child mental well-being. The notice also recommended that staff, consultants, contractors, and volunteers be trained to understand basic developmentally appropriate strategies for supporting positive behavioral interventions, increasing cultural competency, and helping parents curate learning environments that promote children’s self-regulation.81 By using a multidisciplinary team of staff, Head Start emphasizes preventive care, while also increasing access to mental health services. In order to achieve these goals, programs must have adequate staff, yet Head Start already faces a profound workforce shortage.82 Policymakers play a crucial role in strengthening professional pathways by providing robust program funding not only for early educators, but also for occupational therapists, speech therapists, clinical consultants, home visiting specialists, and other Head Start staff who are trained in evidence-based strategies that support whole family mental well-being.83
3. Increase public awareness of the youth mental health crisis and the protective benefit of supporting the mental well-being of young children and their families
Mental health is an important component of overall well-being, starting with young children, who are still developing and learning how to self-regulate, manage difficult emotions, and build connections with others.84 Public awareness of the youth mental health crisis is growing, but policymakers play an important role in supporting access to education about young children’s mental health needs. Head Start promotes awareness through parent education and direct support to mitigate children’s mental health challenges, but policymakers should adopt Head Start as a model for providing broader support to other mental health services, including by establishing new programs modeled on Head Start’s whole-family approach, to support families with young children – even those who do not qualify for Head Start.
Conclusion
Policymakers bear a responsibility to preserve the vital conditions that underlie health and well-being for their constituents, ensuring that people’s basic needs are met and that young children have adequate support that sets them on a trajectory for success. Among those responsibilities is addressing the mental health crisis that continues to affect communities and children as young as infants and toddlers across the country. Investments in the prenatal and early childhood periods have measurable positive impacts on children’s and families’ mental well-being.85 Head Start is a crucial program for the most vulnerable families, with programs and resources dedicated to addressing mental health. It is imperative that policymakers commit to protecting Head Start, expand funding so that it can meet the needs of all eligible families, and look to the program as a model for holistic family support that can help mitigate the youth mental health crisis.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Casey Peeks, Jill Rosenthal, Casey Doherty, Mia Ives-Rublee, Mariam Rashid, and Jared Bass for their thoughtful review of this report, and Paige Shoemaker DeMio and Madison Weiss for their thorough fact-checking.