This study examined, in the context of a stress-buffering model, the relationship of certain family-level variables to children's adjustment after immigration. Immigrant Chinese mothers from Hong Kong completed questionnaires regarding postmigration stress, personal distress, perceived social support, and their child's adjustment. Another adult also provided child behavior ratings. Analyses revealed that, for boys, family stress and maternal distress were significant predictors of child problems and that maternal support buffered the association between family stress and child problems. Contrary to expectation, the relationship between maternal distress and boys' problems was stronger at higher levels of maternal support. For families of girls, although there were significant relationships between the predictors and child behavior, no stress buffering was evident. Cultural explanations are discussed.
All around the world, partnerships among schools and other youth-serving systems are promoting more comprehensive school-based mental health services. This article describes the development of international networks for school mental health (SMH) including the International Alliance for Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Schools (INTERCAMHS) and the more recent School Mental Health International Leadership Exchange (SMHILE). In conjunction with World Conferences on Mental Health Promotion, SMHILE has held pre-conference and planning meetings and has identified five critical themes for the advancement of global SMH: 1) Cross-sector collaboration in building systems of care; 2) meaningful youth and family engagement; 3) workforce development and mental health literacy; 4) implementation of evidence-based practices; and 5) ongoing monitoring and quality assurance. In this article we provide general background on SMH in four nations, two showing strong progress (the United States and Canada), one showing moderate progress (Norway), and one beginning the work (Liberia). Following general background for each country, actions in relation to the SMHILE themes are reviewed. The article concludes with plans and ideas for future global collaboration towards advancement of the SMH field.
Increasingly, the potential for school mental health programming to enhance the well-being of children and youth is being recognized and realized. When evidence-based practices in mental health promotion and prevention are adopted in a whole school manner, students show positive social emotional and academic benefits. These findings have stimulated a proliferation of mental well-being programming for Canadian schools, with variability across offerings in terms of supporting evidence, costs and ease of implementation. In the absence of coordination and guidance, there has been uneven uptake of high-quality programming, resulting in a patchwork of sometimes competing efforts across our country. In order to build cohesive and sustainable evidence-based programming, intentional, explicit and systematic effort must be afforded to matters of implementation and scale-up. In Canada, School Mental Health ASSIST has been developed to provide leadership, implementation support and embeddable resources to the province of Ontario’s 72 school districts, and 5000 schools, with a view to ensuring long-term sustainability of best-in-class school mental health practices. Key elements for uptake and scale-up are described, with an implementation science lens and an emphasis on aspects that are generalizable across jurisdictions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.