As part of the program, mental-health professionals visit classrooms in which teachers or school administrators report students with particularly challenging behavior. After observing the class and visiting the child at home, assigned mental-health consultants guide teachers and parents through specific strategies to best support their students.

“There will never be enough mental-health providers to help all the children who need it, one child at a time, and so what we really need to do is take our mental-health expertise and give it to, or lend it to, the other people who have real, authentic relationships in the lives of these children,” said Gilliam, the study’s lead researcher.

Oftentimes, the consultation process begins with identifying a student’s strengths—an essential part of finding a solution to the child’s challenges, said Linda Flach, a mental-health consultant who used a similar tactic in her work with one particular 4-year-old.

When Flach first visited the child’s school, for example, screaming, hitting, and throwing things had become the norm for the student, who was placed in an already-chaotic classroom alongside a number of children who had severe behavioral problems. Flach met with the child’s parents, teachers, and school administrators to help get all the adults in the child’s life on the same page and to help them recognize that they were all working toward the same goal. She suggested that his parents and teachers focus on helping him identify his emotions through activities like role play and build his emotion regulation skills, which can be taught in simple games like “Simon Says” to promote better impulse control. Other effective strategies, according to Flach, include using visuals like feeling charts and relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, which help students verbalize their emotions before they act on them. Relationship-building is at the core of her role, she said.

Indeed, a key part of the job for Connecticut’s early-childhood mental-health consultants involves supporting parents and teachers. Flach gives teachers guidance in stress-management so they can keep their emotions in check in the classroom and exhibit the same feelings of calm they want their students to experience. Getting angry and yelling at a child for acting out is not likely to help a student calm down, she said. At the same time, Flach reminds educators and parents to acknowledge a student’s feelings instead of dismissing their anger or frustration as the wrong way to react to a situation. The individualized recommendations and direct support that mental-health consultants can provide by observing a child’s classroom and home environment have proven extremely valuable to teachers and parents, Yale’s Gilliam said.

“Teaching is not like math or history. Teaching is a performing art,” Gilliam said. “And we need to teach our teachers like we teach performing artists: by getting in the moment with them and coaching them different ways to be able to do their art.”