When children and young people struggle with anxiety, low mood, or behavioural difficulties, it often puts pressure on everyone around them. For parents, the toll can be especially heavy. Parents of children experiencing mental health problems often have a lot to juggle, including school meetings, long waits for services, and supporting their child emotionally, all alongside work and other caring responsibilities.
Most research into family mental health focuses on how parents influence children, rather than the other way around. A large body of research looks at how parent mental health affects child development and behaviour. On the other hand, there is much less research on how child mental health affects parents. It’s easy to see how parents can be affected by their children’s mental health, and PBE is now researching these effects in more detail.
There is growing evidence that supports early intervention in child and adolescent mental health, and we hope to add to it with our research. We know from our previous work, that improving young people’s mental health is linked to better educational outcomes, higher employment rates, and higher earnings.
Our research on parents’ wellbeing
Through our latest research, we are measuring the effects of child mental health on parental wellbeing and employment. We’re aiming to show if improving young people’s mental health could have economic benefits right now, through their parents, as well as throughout their own lives.
We use the children’s scores on the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), which measures emotional and behavioural difficulties, as an indicator of mental health. So far, we have found that:
- parents of children with high and very high SDQ scores (17 to 40), which suggests mental health problems, are two to three times more likely to report low wellbeing.
- parents of children with very high SDQ scores (20 to 40) earn around £200 less per month.
This suggests that there could be a relationship between child mental health and their parents’ situations, although it does not yet prove a direct impact.
We are now continuing this research to find out how much of these effects can be directly linked to children’s mental health. To do this, we take account of factors that we know affect the wellbeing of adults such as gender, age, and ethnicity, as well as employment, debt, loneliness, and physical and mental health.
Despite growing attention to child and family mental health, we do not yet fully understand how children’s mental health affects parents’ wellbeing and economic circumstances. Our new research aims to help fill that knowledge gap, so that we can continue to build a stronger, clearer case for supporting children and families who are struggling with mental health difficulties.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2834898
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32926075
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032724014320