Families making sense of parental mental health difficulties, v1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Talking and making meaning about parental mental health difficulties: the role of children’s family caregivers
IRAS ID
234373
Contact name
Lizette Nolte
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Hertfordshire
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 5 months, 29 days
Research summary
This is a qualitative interview study in the topic area of parental mental health, focusing on the adult family caregivers of children who have a parent with a moderate to severe, and enduring, mental health difficulty.
For children with a parent with mental health difficulties, being able to make meaning and communicate about their experiences has been highlighted as a key factor in their mental and physical health outcomes, and psychological resilience (Focht-Bickerts & Beardslee, 2000; Nolte & Wren, 2016). Communication, affect regulation and behaviour management are reported as less healthy in families affected by parental mental illness (Dickstein, Seifer, Hayden, Schiller, Sameroff, & Keitner, 1998). Consequently, children growing up with a parent with mental health difficulties may face significant challenges to the development of potentially protective understanding of mental health difficulties.
When a parent is less emotionally or physically available for mental health reasons, children are often dependent upon others for care, such as their other parent, their parent’s partner, grandparents, older siblings and aunts and uncles. These caregivers contribute to the consistency of emotional care, attachment, and meeting of practical needs (Reupert & Maybery, 2007), and also to children's understanding about the parental mental health by the way they communicate with them - or not - about mental health. This shapes children's experience of their parents’ difficulties (Nolte & Wren, 2016). The potential benefit of learning more about these caregivers by hearing from them directly has been widely noted (Biebel, Nicholson, & Wolf, 2016; Foster, 2015; Reupert, et al., 2016; Wang & Goldschmidt, 1996), and is consistent with the need for more family-centric enquiry into parental mental health. As there has been no exploration to date of this communication, including if, and how, it happens, this study aims to address this gap.
REC name
East of England - Cambridge Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/EE/0003
Date of REC Opinion
14 Mar 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion