Rates of mental health challenges among children and youth are on the rise. Physical activity has been identified as a promising intervention to improve mental health outcomes for youth. This study aimed to investigate how mental health clinicians perceive and utilize physical activity as a mental health intervention for children and adolescents. Seventy-four Ontario mental...
Parental anxiety and over-involved parenting behaviour are consistently associated with an increase in child anxiety symptoms. Primary school aged children also often develop a strong and influential relationship with their class teacher and how educators respond to anxiety therefore warrants investigation. Preliminary research has shown that educators use anxiety-promoting...
Self-criticism is a psychological process largely studied as a vulnerability factor for several psychological difficulties in the adult population and, to a lower extent, in adolescent samples. Thus, the availability of instruments to effectively capture this construct is important, especially for younger populations. This study examined the factor structure, measurement...
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and associated public health restrictions created unprecedented challenges for parents and their young dependent children. While psycho-social impacts of natural disasters on families are well studied, a typography of parent specific concerns in the COVID-19 context was yet to be articulated. Using a bioecological systems framework, we adopted...
Levels and drivers of adolescent life satisfaction (LS) vary across nations. School is known to be an important aspect of life affecting adolescent LS, but there are gender differences in how schools may influence LS. However, little is known about how these gender differences vary across countries. A series of statistical analyses (bivariate associations, multilevel regression...
The Social Emotional Distress Scale-Secondary (SEDS-S) is a short measure designed for comprehensive school-based mental health screening, particularly for using very brief self-reported measures of well-being and distress. Whereas prior studies have shown validity and reliability evidence for the English version, there is a lack of literature about its psychometric properties...
Early school dropout is an economic, social, and individual problem. School dropout is a result of cumulative processes that occur over many childhood years. Despite the influence of level of education on health outcomes, primary prevention of dropout outside of the school setting is rare. In the Netherlands, the Youth Health Care (YHC) service may play a role in primary...
Psychological distress is highly noticeable among caregivers working in residential youth care (RYC). Maintaining and enhancing caregivers’ professional mental health and quality of life is crucial to achieve effective outcomes in RYC. Nevertheless, trainings to protect caregivers’ mental health are scarce. Considering the buffering effect over negative psychological outcomes...
Adolescent substance use is often associated with concurrent mental health problems (e.g., depression, suicide attempts, parental emotional and physical abuse, not feeling close to people at school, and lower virtual connectedness) at multiple ecological levels. This study examined whether such risk factors among adolescents were associated with the use of telemental healthcare...
Postsecondary education can provide opportunities for students from traditionally hidden populations like those who have experienced foster care or homelessness. To assist these students, campus support programs (CSPs) provide a wide range of services and activities. Evidence of the impact of CSPs is limited, and little is known about how students who were involved in CSPs fare...
In March 2020, when public health stay home orders began in order to halt the spread of COVID-19, child care as an industry was drastically and abruptly impacted. This public health emergency highlighted the weaknesses in the child care system in the United States. This study investigated the changes in operations cost, child enrollment and attendance, and state and federal...
. Armed conflicts continue to threaten a vast number of children across the world, especially in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). Evidence-based interventions are vital to adequately address the mental health needs in these groups. . This systematic review aims to provide a comprehensive update of the most current developments in mental health and psychosocial support...
In clinical settings, there is significant need for brief, easily-administered assessment tools for adolescent depression that can be used by mental health clinicians from a variety of training backgrounds. Existing depression screening tools do not assess for duration and consistency of symptoms, two key indicators of pathological depression. The Brief Adolescent Depression...
Prescription drug misuse among youth aged 12–18 remains high in the United States. Grounded in Social Norms Theory, school-based curricula have been shown to effectively challenge students’ misperceptions of peer norms and safety regarding prescription drug misuse (PDM). The present study is a quasi-experimental evaluation of a brief, no cost, school-based prescription drug...
Given that high levels of stress during adolescence are associated with negative consequences, it is important that adolescents with psychological needs are supported at an early stage, for instance with interventions at school. However, knowledge about the potential of school-based programs targeting adolescents with psychological needs, aimed at reducing school or social stress...
Previous research suggests that interactions between preschool teachers and children in early care and educational contexts can contribute to the child’s positive attachment development and socioemotional adjustment. Investigate how the transition process to preschool is organized and whether various ways of organizing it may differently influence family–teacher relationship...
Exposure therapy (“exposure”) for youth anxiety is highly underutilized in clinical practice. Asynchronous, online implementation strategies such as online toolkits hold promise as pragmatic approaches for extending the sustainability of evidence-based interventions, but their long-term usage, perceived utility, and impact are rarely studied. This study presents three-year...
Recently arriving to US schools, 405 immigrant adolescents in a large, urban high school shared backgrounds and perspectives on what variables and sociocultural factors contributed to their sense of belonging in their new school. This study occurred in 2019–2020 and examined belonging during a xenophobic socio-political climate. This study examines what predictors and experiences...
Teachers’ professional commitment is essential for providing high-quality early care and education (ECE) to young children. Previous studies suggest that teachers’ perceptions of low levels of personal stress and a satisfactory work environment are both likely to be associated with their greater commitment to work. The current study examined the incremental validity of work...
Studies assessing the effects of parenting programs have focused on interventions delivered through face-to-face modalities. There is a need for research to evaluate the effects of online parenting programs on child development, such as the BEM Program (‘Play Teaches Change’ in English), an online play-based parenting program that teaches caregivers on how to introduce playful...
With the increase of cyberbullying, several intervention programmes have been created that aim at reducing cyber-victimisation and perpetration. Our study presents the effects of the STAnD anti-cyberbullying programme with peer-education both on the short and the long run among lower and upper primary school students, with a focus on the participants’ cyberbullying roles. The...
Despite extensive work to prevent and reduce bullying interactions, bullying is still a prevalent problem in many schools. Children and youth also report that they feel involuntarily left out in school. While research has demonstrated the ways in which school bullying is connected to risk factors across different ecological layers or contexts, relatively little consideration has...