Parental and children's report of emotional problems: agreement, explanatory factors and event‐emotion correlation

Abstract

Background: As often only parents are addressed, studying parent-child agreement and its explanatory factors is crucial in gaining accurate information on young children's emotional problems. Method: Parental and children's reports of children's emotional problems (anger, anxiety, sadness) and children's reports of life events were gathered between February and June, 2010 from 464 Belgian nonclinical children 5-10 years old. Results: Children reported more emotional problems than their parents. Parental underestimation was higher in the case of girls, older children, nontraditional family structures and authoritative parenting style. Furthermore, life events and emotional problems were significantly correlated only when using children's reported emotions. Conclusions: In our nonclinical children, interviewing both parents and children on children's emotional problems is necessary and parent-child disagreement can partially be explained by child or family characteristics

Cutting a Long Story Short? The Clinical Relevance of Asking Parents, Nurses, and Young Children Themselves to Identify Children’s Mental Health Problems by One or Two Questions

“…In the present study, it was not our purpose to compare the child's and the adults' reports because adult informants answered a similar question on overall difficulties whereas the child's questions focused on his/her emotional well-being and expectations. However, the weak correlation between the parent's and the child's evaluations was in concordance with earlier studies [ 4 , 10 , 11 ]. As expected, the agreement between the parent's one-question screen and the first question on the SDQ impact supplement was high.…”

“…The child's self-reported frequency of emotional problems in this study was lower than in earlier studies with validated assessment methods [ 30 , 31 ]. Recently, 12–16% of Belgian 5- to 10-year-old children reported emotional problems, such as anger, anxiety, and sadness, in a short self-report questionnaire [ 11 ]. Further studies are needed on young children's self-reported frequencies of emotional problems in community and clinic samples.…”

“…Evidence suggests that any agreement between the child's and adults' reports is stronger with respect to externalizing than to internalizing problems [ 4 ]. In addition, children tend to report more emotional symptoms than do their parents or teachers [ 4 , 9 – 11 ]. It has recently been concluded that using only parental reports for assessing children's emotions results in an underestimation of emotional problems [ 11 ].…”

“…In addition, children tend to report more emotional symptoms than do their parents or teachers [ 4 , 9 – 11 ]. It has recently been concluded that using only parental reports for assessing children's emotions results in an underestimation of emotional problems [ 11 ]. Thus it seems necessary to further develop and assess self-report methods also for young children.…”

Indicators of problems evaluated by parents and children stratified by birth weight

“…Accordingly, the use of different sources of information is considered as a paradigm of psychological assessment of children since it is more reliable and broadly representative of the children evaluated (Hughes & Gullone, 2010;Michels et al, 2013).…”