Come One, Come All: Moderators of the Relation Between Psychological Difficulties and Mental Health Treatment Among Caregiver-Child Dyads

Austin F Lau

doi:10.7273/000005341

Paradigm shifts in inpatient and outpatient pediatric health care settings have led to greater implementation of family-centered care (FCC) principles, which emphasize collaboration between provider(s), patients’ families, and the patients themselves. A means to better understand the interactions that are commonplace in an FCC model—which may further provide insight as to overcoming the barriers in FCC—is through a systems or ecological framework examining individual and microsystem interactions. Through a two-part analysis of an archival health-focused dataset, the study aimed to (1) explicate the complex relations between child and caregiver psychological symptoms and their mental health treatment utilization and (2) determine possible health-focused indicators in caregivers and children accompanying common mental health conditions with an unsupervised, exploratory procedure. Participants were 3784 caregiver-child dyads. The average age of caregivers in the current sample was 39.52 years, and the average age for children was 10.41 years. Data collected in the study were all reported by randomly selected adults who were knowledgeable caregivers. We expected caregivers’ treatment utilization and psychological distress to differentially moderate the positive relation between child mental health difficulties and child treatment utilization. In contrast, we predicted that both child’s mental health difficulties and child’s treatment utilization enhanced the positive relation between caregiver psychological distress and caregiver treatment utilization. Emerging evidence was found for the moderating role of caregiver utilization of treatment on the relation between child mental health difficulties and child utilization of treatment. However, caregiver psychological distress, child utilization of treatment, and child mental health difficulties did not moderate their corresponding predictor-criterion variables. Exploratory analyses using multiple correspondence analysis yielded two dimensions, capturing approximately 24% of total variation in the dataset. Variation in variable categories corresponding to caregiver mental health and physiological conditions were larger contributors to dimension 1, whereas child developmental psychopathology variables contributed more to dimension 2. Overall, the study provided a better understanding of mental health treatment utilization among children and their caregivers and generated recommendations for facilitating FCC principles in health settings.

Come One, Come All: Moderators of the Relation Between Psychological Difficulties and Mental Health Treatment Among Caregiver-Child Dyads

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