Adopters play a vital role in caring for the most vulnerable children in our society, yet many face a continuous battle to gain access to appropriate support for their children. Furthermore, adopters frequently experience conflict in the family home in the form of child-to-parent aggression. However, little is known about other forms of conflict faced by adopters. Based on focus groups with 47 UK-based adopters, this qualitative study explores the range of adopters’ experiences of conflict when caring and advocating for their children, the impact of conflict on adopters’ mental health and wellbeing, and solutions for conflict resolution proposed by adopters, paying particular attention to the role of empathy and compassion. The study finds adopters face multiple sources of conflict, primarily in the family home, with adoption professionals, and with education providers, all of which impact negatively on adopters’ mental health. Based on study findings, a conflict management model is developed comprising a three-step process to resolve conflict, encompassing Awareness, Understanding, and Prosocial Behaviors. Findings may be used to inform future service provision to alleviate conflict experienced by adopters and mitigating its negative effect on both adopters and the wider family dynamic, so that adopters and families may remain functioning. Adopters face multiple sources of conflict: in the family home, with adoption professionals, and with education providers. Additional support is required to mitigate the impact of conflict on adopters’ mental health. A conflict management model is proposed following a three-step process - Awareness, Understanding, and Prosocial Behaviors.
Parental psychological control—defined as control over a child through psychological tactics that manipulate the child’s emotions or thoughts such as guilt induction, love withdrawal, and invalidation—has consistently been associated with internalizing emotional problems in children. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this association have rarely been explored. Drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks, this study examined whether sense of control and negative automatic thoughts serially mediate the relationship between recalled past experiences of parental psychological control and internalizing symptoms in emerging adults. We found that sense of control—particularly perceived constraints and not personal mastery—and negative automatic thoughts serially mediated the relation between past paternal and maternal psychological control and current depressive and anxious symptoms. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings were discussed, highlighting the importance of cognitive factors in interventions to mitigate the effects of parental psychological control.
Child marriage continues to be a widespread problem in many societies today. Girls who should be in compulsory education are being taken out of school for various reasons. Girls who are taken out of school or forced to early school leaving are sometimes forced into child marriage after elementary school and sometimes after middle school. The present research aims to examine the processes experienced by vulnerable girl students in rural areas who are forced to drop out of school while attending the basic education level and who are also forced to become child brides. In-depth interviews were conducted by telephone with 10 child brides who were forced into child marriage, whose identities and locations were kept confidential, and with 5 parents. In addition, in-depth face-to-face interviews were conducted with 9 teachers who had witnessed the issue of child brides and 10 girl students at the secondary/undergraduate levels. The sample for the study, conducted in rural areas of Türkiye, was determined using the snowball sampling technique. The research employed a descriptive phenomenological design, and the collected data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) inductive thematic analysis approach. According to the research findings, child brides were forced into marriage after being subjected to serious violence. Only five of the child brides had children. Tribalism, tradition, kinship, family pressure, and economic difficulties were the main factors in the child marriages of participants with significant age differences between them and their spouses. Child marriage was intertwined with early school leaving in rural Türkiye. Family pressure, tradition, kinship, and poverty shaped marriage decisions. Participants reported violence, abuse, insecurity, and loss of rights. Schools and teachers emerged as key actors in early identification and support. Protection requires legal, economic, educational, and psychosocial support.
Multi-informant reporting has long been recommended as one of several best practices for assessing children and adolescent psychopathology (Kraemer et al., 2003). This approach includes gathering information from the youth as well as others in their ecology, often including caregivers, teachers, and mental health providers (Hunsley Mash, 2007). Gathering information from multiple perspectives is often essential and yields benefits through broadening available data and examining cross-informant reporting patterns that might affect assessment findings and treatment recommendations (De Los Reyes et al., 2015). However, it has been acknowledged that in both clinical and research settings, informants often provide diverging perspectives when reporting about youth emotional and behavioral concerns. These diverging perspectives are commonly referred to in the literature as “informant discrepancies” (Achenbach et al., 1987). More recently, researchers have found that such discrepancies at treatment intake have been linked to poor youth outcomes and responses to intervention. Using polynomial regression and response surface analyses, the current study examined the relation between caregiver-youth informant discrepancies at treatment intake and youth functional impairment at discharge using a multiethnic public mental health sample of 366 caregiver-youth dyads. Overall, while there were slightly mixed findings across Total Scale and Subscale scores, results generally supported an association between increased levels of youth functional impairment at treatment discharge with both (a) high levels of caregiver-youth agreement and (b) higher caregiver-reports of problem severity compared to their respective youth at intake. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. • The extent to which informant discrepancies on youth problems at intake predicted youth functional impairment at treatment discharge in a large, ethnically diverse public mental health sample was examined. • Using the latest statistical approach, response surface analysis, this study was able to simultaneously examine patterns between a dependent variable and levels of agreement and disagreement between independent variables. • Results generally supported an association between increased levels of youth functional impairment at treatment discharge with both (a) high levels of caregiver-youth agreement and (b) higher caregiver-reports of problem severity compared to their respective youth at intake.
Teenage childbirth is considered a contributing factor to lifelong health and social disparities for mothers; however, evidence is mostly derived from cross-sectional studies utilizing self-report surveys and is often limited to one or a few psychosocial outcomes. We compared the risk of adverse psychosocial outcomes during young adulthood, including inpatient hospitalization for mental illness (MI) or substance use disorder (SUD), and offending, among teenage mothers (< 20 years), adult mothers (≥ 20 years) and non-mothers. Data included females born in Queensland, Australia, in 1983 and 1984, followed to age 29–31 years who were registered as mothers via birth records (N = 18,188). MI and SUD were identified from inpatient hospital records, while offending data were obtained from police and court records. Risks of adverse psychosocial outcomes in young adulthood were compared between teenage mothers, adult mothers and non-mothers using regression analyses. The lifetime prevalence of adverse psychosocial outcomes was significantly higher among teenage mothers (55.0
