Including Infant Voice: An Integrative Literature Review

What is the current understanding of how services working with infants recognise and take account of infant ‘voice’ in order to include their perspective and help them to exercise their rights?

The voice of the child is one of the 5 pillars of The Promise (Scottish Government Policy Document, 2020) and a key component of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The youngest infants are included within the scope of these documents. Infants however are in a unique position when it comes to their rights given their specific vulnerabilities (WAIMH, 2016). For example, they are completely dependent on others and often have minimal contact beyond their home. Plus, we must think about developmentally appropriate ways that we can recognise infants’ non-verbal communications as they share their ‘voice’. The perspective of the infant is at risk of being missed in the design and delivery of the services that work with them.

For these reasons, in Scotland, the Infant Mental Health Implementation and Advisory Group (IMH-IAG) accountable to the Perinatal and Infant Mental Health Programme Board (PNIMH-PB), set up a Voice of the Infant subgroup to review approaches and tools to address this gap and develop new guidance if required. This review will inform that work by bringing together the existing evidence and theoretical literature on infants’ rights and how we take infant voice into account. This takes an integrative approach to bring together quantitative, qualitative and theoretical literature.