As a parent, I’m aware that I am occasionally over-protective. I just about flipped when my husband allowed my teenage daughter’s boyfriend (who has only had his license for 3 months) to drive her to Homecoming. (Not surprisingly, she never bothered to ask my permission but went straight to him.) I set our v-Chip to block out anything more risque than a G-rating before 10 p.m. just in case my 6-year-old son wanders into the room. I’m even incapable of walking into the house without immediately locking the door behind me thanks to all those awful news stories about kids being kidnapped right out of the own homes. All too often, I find myself thinking “How much easier it was to keep them safe when my kids were just babies!”

Apparently, I’m out of the loop, because all of the truly hyper-vigilant parents are signing their infants up for therapy.

Jean M. Thomas, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist, recently saw a patient who was struggling with her emotions. She was agitated and couldn’t stop crying. She was recovering from an eating problem and had trouble forming relationships.

She was 11 months old.

Therapists are increasingly moving their treatments from the couch to the crib. While the field of infant mental health — which encompasses the study of children from birth through age three — has been around for decades, new research on everything from brain development to maternal depression is giving it a boost. A widely used mental health and development diagnostic manual for infants was revised last year for the first time since 1994 to include two new subsets of depression, five new subsets of anxiety disorders (including separation anxiety and social anxiety disorders) and six new subsets of feeding behavior disorders (including sensory food aversions and infantile anorexia).

By starting treatment as soon as possible — even before their patients are out of diapers — doctors feel they are helping kids become better adjusted.

Not a bad racket: bill $150 per hour to treat a patient who’s quite likely to sleep through the appointment and can neither tell you what the problem is nor whether the “treatment” is helping.

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