Do you see me for who I am? On the role of parental-child assessment consistency in children’s mental well-being
Keywords:
Assessment agreement; psychological difficulties; well-being; primary school
Abstract:
Studies on the multi-perspective assessment of mental health show that assessment agreement between pupils and teachers or parents is low to moderate, and that there is greater agreement regarding externalising problems than internalising problems (Achenbach, McConaughy & Howell, 1987; De Los Reyes et al., 2015). This research suggests that the lack of assessment agreement could offer diagnostic value. For instance, the discrepancy in assessments between teachers and pupils appears to be predictive of children’s experience of stress (Lüdeke & Linderkamp, 2019). Significant discrepancies between parents and children are associated with adverse developmental outcomes (Guion, Mrug & Windle, 2009). The present study takes into account the perspectives of both children and their parents or carers to examine the influence of assessment discrepancies in the home environment within the primary school context and their significance for children’s psychological well-being. In current research, mental health and subjective well-being are regarded as two distinct aspects that are orthogonal to one another (Westerhof & Keyes, 2010). High well-being is associated with physical health (Diener & Chan, 2011), satisfaction in peer relationships (Suldo et al., 2016) and better academic performance (Bucker et al., 2018). Significant discrepancies in the assessment of mental health may indicate a strained parent-child relationship (De Los Reyes & Kazdin, 2006) and consequently be negatively associated with pupils’ well-being.
The research question is as follows: To what extent does pupils’ mental well-being depend on their agreement with their parents regarding externalising and internalising constructs?
H1: The higher both parties rate a target construct (hyperactivity/emotional problems), the smaller the difference between parents and children regarding that target construct.
H2: The greater the difference in assessment between parents and their children, the lower the children’s psychological well-being.
A cross-sectional survey was conducted as part of the SENSOR project involving n = 500 pupils (48% female) from 76 classes in the third (49%) and fourth year (mean age = 9.08; standard deviation of age = 0.70) of primary school. The constructs of depression and hyperactivity were measured as indicators of the child’s perception from the perspective of both the pupils and their parents. The child-perceived assessment was carried out using the BASC (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2020), and the parent-perceived assessment using the German version of the SDQ (Koglin, Barquero, Mayer, Scheithauer & Petermann, 2007). Mental well-being was assessed using the KIDSCREEN-10 (Ravens-Sieberer et al., 2014). For the analysis, multilevel analyses were performed using the R package lme4 (Bates, Mächler, Bolker & Walker, 2015).
Results:
The agreement between parents’ and children’s assessments was determined using the magnitude of the differences in the z-standardised scores of the two inventories. Absolute assessment differences of 0.90 (SD internalising = 0.84) for internalising and 0.93 (SD externalising = 0.72) for externalising were observed. Contrary to the hypotheses, it was found that higher parental ratings of hyperactivity (β=0.08, p<.001) and emotional problems (β=0.12, p<.001) were associated with greater assessment differences between parents and children. The same pattern was observed for children’s self-reports in the externalising (β=0.05, p<.001) and internalising (β=0.08, p<.001) domains. In line with H2, a larger assessment difference between parents and children was negatively associated with the children’s psychological well-being. This was demonstrated for both the internalising (β=-2.85, p<.001) and the externalising (β=-1.35, p=.037) domains. Furthermore, it was shown that the magnitude of the parental judgement exhibits an interaction effect with the absolute difference. Visual inspection revealed that the higher the initial parental judgement regarding the assessment of internalising and externalising problems, the less the difference in judgement is associated with psychological well-being.
Discussion:
The hypotheses were partially confirmed by the present sample. They suggest that, in particular, underestimating a potential problem for the child leads to pupils exhibiting lower psychological well-being. Ways in which schools can support parents in developing a more sensitive awareness of problems are discussed.