Relationships of Shared Decision Making with Parental Perceptions of Child Mental Health Functioning and Care

Abstract

Experts encourage parents and practitioners to engage in shared decision making (SDM) to provide high quality child mental health care. However, little is known regarding SDM among families of children with common mental health conditions. The objectives of this study were to examine associations between parental report of SDM and parental perceptions of (a) receiving child mental health care and (b) child mental health functioning. We analyzed cross-sectional data on children with a common mental health condition (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional-defiant or conduct disorder, anxiety, or depression) from the 2009/2010 National Survey of Children with Special Healthcare Needs (N = 9,434). The primary independent variable was parent-reported SDM, and the dependent variables were parental perception of (a) their child receiving all needed mental health care (b) their children's impairment in school attendance and extracurricular activity participation, and (c) severity of their children's mental health condition. Multivariate logistic and multinomial regression analyses were conducted. Greater parent-reported SDM was associated with parental perceptions of receiving all needed child mental health care and children not having school or extracurricular impairment. Greater SDM was also associated with perceptions of children having a mild mental health condition compared to children having a moderate or severe condition. Findings provide a basis for future longitudinal and intervention studies to examine the benefit of SDM for improving parental perceptions of the quality of child mental health care and mental health functioning among children with common mental health conditions.

Latent Class Analysis: A Guide to Best Practice

“…Covariates. Consistent with previous research using data from the NSCH, we included the following control variables: gender, income based on federal poverty level, highest level of education, and primary language spoken in the home (e.g., Butler et al, 2015;Weller et al, 2018;Weller et al, 2019).…”

Barriers and facilitators to shared decision‐making in child and youth mental health: Exploring young person and parent perspectives using the Theoretical Domains Framework

“…Research to date has outlined that most SDM interventions focus on externalising difficulties (Cheng et al, ). Despite this, recent research suggests that the prevalence of internalising difficulties is increasing in young people (Deighton et al, ; Fink et al, ) and that increased severity of difficulty, rather than whether difficulties are classified as internalising or externalising, predicts lower levels of SDM (Butler, Weller, & Titus, ). When interventions do exist for internalising difficulties, they appear to be targeted at ‘older’ teenagers (Simmons, Elmes, Mckenzie, Trevena, & Hetrick, ; Simmons et al, ) who may be attending the appointment without parents and are ‘competent to consent’ to treatment decisions.…”

Barriers and facilitators to shared decision making in child and youth mental health: clinician perspectives using the Theoretical Domains Framework

“…The scoping review also identified that most approaches to SDM tend to focus on externalising difficulties [6]. However, research suggests that increasing severity of both internalising and externalising difficulties of young people has been found to predict SDM [8, 11–13]. There is increasing evidence of rising rates of internalising difficulties in youth, particularly in girls, with reporting raised anxiety and depression [14, 15].…”