Trajectories of Failure: The Educational Careers of Children with Mental Health Problems

Abstract

The authors draw on developmental psychopathology, life course sociology, and scholarship on educational processes to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the association of children's mental health problems with educational attainment. They use this framework to address two empirical gaps in prior research: lack of attention to mental health trajectories and the failure to consider diverse explanations. Using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth data set, the authors identify latent classes that characterize trajectories of internalizing and externalizing problems from childhood through adolescence. Youths in the classes vary significantly in their likelihoods of high school completion and college entry. The authors evaluate the ability of three sets of mediators to explain these patterns: academic aptitude, disruptive behaviors, and educational expectations. Educational expectations are important mediators independent of academic aptitude and disruptive behaviors. Social responses to youths' mental health problems contribute importantly to their disrupted educational trajectories.Researchers from many different disciplines study whether, how, and why children's mental health problems affect socioeconomic success in adulthood. Educational researchers evaluate the implications of emotional and behavioral "readiness" at school entry for future academic performance as a means to understand and rectify persistent educational inequalities (e.g., Campbell et al. 2006; Spira and Fischel 2005;Vitaro et al. 2005). Health policy scholars estimate the effects of early-onset mental disorders on socioeconomic attainment to establish the societal relevance of the disorders and to argue for greater attention to mental health policy (e.g., Jayakody, Danziger, and Kessler 1998;Kessler et al. 1995). Epidemiologists in sociology and public health examine whether childhood mental health problems have effects on subsequent socioeconomic attainment in order to test the relative importance of social "selection" and social "causation" explanations for sociodemographic differences in mental health (e.g., Johnson et al. 1999; Miech et al. 1999;Ritsher et al. 2001). Despite commonalities in the measures and methods of these lines of research, they proceed relatively independently with little communication across disciplinary and substantive boundaries.Our goal in this article is to evaluate what we have and have not learned from these diverse efforts, and to present an analysis that locates these efforts in a comprehensive conceptual framework. The framework we develop draws on insights from developmental psychopathology, life course sociology, and scholarship on educational processes to highlight patterns of mental health among children and adolescents and to develop hypotheses about the NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript implications of those patterns for educational attainment. We evaluate our hypotheses using prospective longitudinal data on y...

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“…Prior research showed mixed findings, an explanation might be that the earlier reported associations were due to cooccurrence of internalizing problems with externalizing and attention problems. This is supported by the observation that studies which adjusted for psychiatric comorbidity, did not find significant associations [5,6,11], whereas studies which did not adjust for comorbidity found significant associations [7,12]. In contrast, we found a significant associations of increasing internalizing problems between age 11 and 16 and low educational attainment at age 19.…”

“…While several studies reported that internalizing problems were not associated with educational attainment [6,[8][9][10][11], others showed associations with high school dropout, high school graduation failure and failure to enter college [7,[12][13][14][15]. For attention problems, several studies reported a statistically significant association with low educational attainment [5,6,8,16].…”

“…First, although most studies use longitudinal data [5,8,11,[13][14][15], changes over time in mental health problems are seldom addressed [12,16]. Second, measurement error may be relatively large due to reliance on just one informant.…”

“…Even though it is known that use of multiple informants increases the reliability of the given information [17,18], to our knowledge none of the aforementioned studies employed more than one informant, i.e. either the adolescent [8,10] or a parent [9,12]. Finally, most studies concern the US-setting and studies in the European setting are sparse [3,4,11].…”

Disparities in Receipt of Specialty Services Among Children With Mental Health Need Enrolled in the CMHI

“…Moreover, children from minority groups are more likely than white non-Latino children to receive inadequate mental health treatment (12,14). In turn, disparities in mental health have lifelong consequences in regard to racial disparities, including education failure and justice involvement (15)(16)(17).…”