Researchers evaluated 42 potential targets spanning behavioral, emotional, cognitive, family, peer, school and personality domains. Panel members rated targets for children and adolescents separately and also assessed their practical feasibility in real-world settings. The modified Delphi method is designed to build consensus among experts. Of the targets receiving high-priority ratings, 13 for children and 17 for adolescents were considered at least moderately feasible to address in outpatient care.

For children, the strongest priorities centered on the home. Panel members emphasized inconsistent parenting, low parental involvement and negative parental beliefs toward the child. Emotional skills, including empathy and the ability to regulate emotions, were also important, along with selected school and environmental factors. For adolescents, family and parenting factors remained important, but the priorities broadened to include peer-related and emotional targets, including difficulties with empathy, emotion processing and motivation to change. Several cognitive factors were also prioritized, including deviant goals and values and difficulties with moral reasoning. Aggressive, defiant and conduct-related behaviors remained core targets across both age groups.

Joyce Lui, an assistant professor in Concordia University’s Department of Psychology and the paper’s corresponding author, said the results do not point to one new treatment to pursue. Instead, they show which areas stakeholders consider important and feasible. The priorities may help researchers decide which elements to include in interventions and how those elements might be sequenced and dosed in future studies. Some peer- and school-related priorities could require greater involvement from and coordination with institutions outside clinical environments, particularly schools, rather than relying on outpatient care alone.

The findings also underscore the need for treatment to address more than a reduction in disruptive behavior. Lui noted that treatments focused on disruptive behavior already exist and work well, but they may need to be expanded to address the emotional, cognitive and relationship stresses associated with callous-unemotional traits, especially among adolescents. Callous-unemotional traits can include reduced empathy, limited guilt and lack of concern for others. The authors said they were not aware of an existing treatment designed specifically for youths with a callous and unemotional subgroup, and that evidence is mixed when standard treatments are adapted for those cases. The study itself did not compare treatments, establish their effectiveness or determine whether any prioritized target leads to better clinical outcomes. Further research is therefore needed to evaluate the usefulness, sequencing and dosing of different treatment components. The authors also cautioned that callous-unemotional traits are not fixed and should not be used to assume that affected youths cannot benefit from treatment.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder-prioritized treatment targets for youths with disruptive behavior and callous-unemotional traits

Article Title: Youths with disruptive behaviour and callous-unemotional traits need a broad range of treatments, Concordia study shows

Article References: Youths with disruptive behaviour and callous-unemotional traits need a broad range of treatments, Concordia study shows. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: child mental health, adolescent mental health, disruptive behavior, callous-unemotional traits, Delphi consensus, treatment priorities, parenting, emotional regulation, empathy, school coordination, clinical psychology, Youths

The trial is intended to address a gap in two areas at once: the limited implementation of evidence-based parenting interventions in Filipino communities and the shortage of research on delivering such programs online. The study background reports that Filipino youth in the United States have higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety and substance use than other Asian subgroups and non-Hispanic whites, while also being less likely to seek help or receive preventive care. The authors frame the project as a response to these disparities, although the protocol itself cannot establish whether the new program will alter those outcomes. Its immediate focus is on positive parenting practices and child-reported internalizing symptoms, with the longer-term aim of preventing the onset or escalation of behavioral health problems.

Participants will be individually assigned to either a 12-week intervention or a usual-care control group that will receive the Incredible Years program after three months. Each intervention session is scheduled to last two hours and will be delivered remotely once a week. The culturally adapted program is based on the Incredible Years Parenting Program, an established approach designed to promote social-emotional learning and positive behavioral outcomes. By offering the control group delayed access, the design preserves access to the intervention while allowing the researchers to compare changes observed before the control group begins the program with those seen in the immediate-treatment group.

The primary outcomes are parent-reported positive verbal discipline, measured with the Parent Practices Interview; child-reported depression, assessed through the Child Depression Inventory; and child-reported anxiety symptoms, measured with the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders. Secondary measures will include parent-reported physical punishment, child internalizing behavior assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist, parent-reported child depression and anxiety, and youth resilience measured with the Child and Youth Resilience Measure. Both parents and children will report resilience. Assessments will occur at baseline and at three- and six-month follow-ups, making six months the final observation point described in the protocol.

The project is registered as version 1.0 of the Filipino Family Health Initiative in ClinicalTrials.gov under identifier NCT06569303, with registration dated August 22, 2024. The protocol was accepted for publication in BMC Psychology as an open-access study protocol and is presented as an early version of the peer-reviewed article. Researchers will examine both the intervention’s effectiveness and its implementation, a feature of the Type 1 hybrid design. That approach integrates effectiveness and implementation questions, but no comparative results are available in the supplied protocol. Consequently, the study should be understood as a test of a remotely delivered, culturally adapted parenting intervention for an at-risk population, not as evidence that the program has already prevented depression, anxiety or adverse parenting practices.

Subject of Research: Randomized trial protocol for a culturally adapted remote parenting intervention among Filipino American families

Article Title: Virtual parenting intervention to promote positive parenting and prevent child anxiety and depression symptoms among filipino americanfamilies: protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Article References: Javier, J. R., Mesina, D. M., Osumo, J. R., Aligaen, K. A., Cunanan, P. L., Adili, A., Kipke, M. D., Palinkas, L. A., & Mack, W. J. (2026). Virtual parenting intervention to promote positive parenting and prevent child anxiety and depression symptoms among filipino americanfamilies: protocol for a randomized controlled trial. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05534-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05534-x

Keywords: Filipino American families, parenting intervention, child anxiety, child depression, Incredible Years, telehealth, randomized controlled trial, positive parenting, youth resilience, Virtual, parenting, intervention

Participants were recruited through Qualtrics panels and included 239 mothers, or 63.6% of the sample, and 137 fathers, or 36.4%. Parents had an average age of 40.16 years and at least one child between 3 and 17 years old, whose average age was 9.88 years. Researchers used latent profile analysis to characterize groups based on the pattern of positive and negative parenting reported by parents. Linear regression analyses then examined associations between those profiles and six parent-reported child psychopathology scores, with adjustments for covariates.

Three profiles emerged. High Positive/Low Negative Parenting accounted for 209 participants, or 55.6% of the sample. Intermediate Parenting included 125 participants, or 33.2%, while Very Low Positive/Elevated Negative Parenting included 42 participants, or 11.2%. The regression models explained a significant share of variance in all six psychopathology scores, with R² values ranging from 16.2% to 28.4% and p values below 0.001. Compared with children whose parents were in the High Positive/Low Negative Parenting profile, children in the Intermediate and Very Low Positive/Elevated Negative profiles had significantly higher scores on every parent-reported psychopathology scale, with p values of 0.01 or lower.

Parent sex and child age did not significantly moderate the relationships between parenting profiles and reported child psychopathology. In other words, the associations observed in this sample did not differ significantly by the sex of the parent or the age of the child. The study supports the conclusion that Asian American parenting practices were heterogeneous within this group and that profiles involving less positive or more negative parenting were associated with greater parent-reported child difficulties.

These results do not establish that parenting profiles caused the reported psychopathology or that the three groups apply to all Asian American families. The evidence summarized in the abstract comes from a cross-sectional, US-based sample recruited from Qualtrics panels, and child outcomes were reported by parents rather than independently assessed. The analysis also examined associations within one sample of 376 families, so the findings describe statistical relationships rather than changes over time, causal effects, or universal patterns across Asian American subgroups.

Subject of Research: Associations among Asian American parenting profiles and parent-reported child psychopathology in a US cross-sectional sample

Article Title: Asian american parenting profiles and child psychopathology: a cross-sectional latent profile analysis

Article References: Benhayoun, A., Hua, A. Y., Chen, J., & Rodriguez, V. J. (2026). Asian american parenting profiles and child psychopathology: a cross-sectional latent profile analysis. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05755-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05755-0

Keywords: Asian American families, parenting profiles, child psychopathology, latent profile analysis, cross-sectional study, parent-reported outcomes, child mental health, family research, Asian, american, parenting, profiles

Researchers analysed interviews conducted between May and October 2024 as part of the Family-oriented Rehabilitation for Adults with Mental Disorders project. Participants were patients with children who were receiving regular psychosomatic rehabilitation but were not receiving the family-oriented programme being developed. The original interview guide focused on family life, expectations and concerns; work and work-family compatibility emerged repeatedly without being the study’s initial focus. The researchers used a mixed deductive and inductive category-development approach for the first research question and a separate typifying content analysis of case summaries for the second.

The sample comprised 20 women and 12 men aged 26 to 57. All had between one and four children living in their household, with children ranging from infancy to 25 years. Thirty participants were employed at least part-time, including 13 who were on sick leave and one on parental leave. Self-reported reasons for rehabilitation included depression, burnout, exhaustion and anxiety disorders. Interviews averaged 60 minutes and were transcribed, reviewed, edited and anonymised before analysis. All interview material was in German, with selected passages translated for publication.

The analysis initially used established categories of work-family conflict based on time, strain and behaviour. Some accounts fit those categories, including family caregiving pressures that impaired work performance and work demands such as overtime or shift work that disrupted family life. However, the researchers found that this framework did not fully capture the recurring configurations described by participants. They therefore developed an alternative organization of the material in which time-, strain- and behaviour-related aspects remained embedded within eight empirically derived intrapersonal manifestations.

The eight manifestations were External Control, Excessive Performance Demands, Self-Sacrifice, Uncontrolled Boundary Blurring, Moral Conflicts, Invisible Loneliness, Existential Anxiety and Threat to Self-Identity. These categories described recurrent patterns in participants’ thoughts, emotions and behaviours. They were not mutually exclusive and could co-occur, interact or reinforce one another. Participants commonly described the conflict as a persistent internal tension rather than an isolated episode, with some reporting that it continued even after an external source of stress had been removed.

Separate case summaries captured how each participant understood the relationship among work-related stress, family-related stress and mental disorder. The resulting 13 scenarios represented different relational configurations rather than 13 individual cases. Some participants described mental disorder as a consequence of sustained work or family strain, while others treated it as the starting point that affected both domains. Other accounts described accumulation, cascading effects or simultaneous interactions without assigning a clear causal direction. In several cases, a critical life event disrupted an earlier balance between work and family.

Participants’ choice of language varied with the narrative position they described. Those who primarily attributed their condition to external pressures more often used terms such as burnout, exhaustion or overload, whereas participants who described mental disorder as the origin of their difficulties more often used clinical labels such as depression or anxiety disorder. A preliminary pattern linked external attributions with external control, excessive performance demands, self-sacrifice and uncontrolled boundary blurring, and internal attributions with moral conflicts, invisible loneliness, existential anxiety and threat to self-identity. The authors cautioned that the sample was too small to establish whether these relationships occur systematically in larger populations.

Several manifestations resembled features of depression or burnout, but participants often treated work-family conflict as a separate, legitimate burden rooted in everyday role demands. The findings therefore do not establish that the manifestations are diagnostically distinct in every case. The analysis could not determine whether depression initiated, sustained or amplified work-family conflict. The scenarios also reconstruct participants’ temporal and causal attributions rather than demonstrating objective causal relationships, and the study did not measure treatment response, symptom reduction, return to work or quality of life.

Several limitations restrict the findings’ scope. The work-family theme was analysed secondarily from interviews designed primarily to explore family-related rehabilitation needs. The sample came from one German clinic and consisted specifically of parents recruited for a family-oriented project, so people with pronounced conflict may have been more likely to participate. It remains uncertain whether the findings apply to patients without children or to the broader German rehabilitation population. The exploratory category and scenario systems are also not exhaustive, and a larger sample could identify additional patterns.

The authors proposed that explicitly examining work-family conflict could complement clinical case formulation by making patients’ descriptions of persistent strain more visible. They also suggested that future longitudinal research should test how conflict relates to rehabilitation outcomes, including symptom reduction, return to work and quality of life. Those implications remain proposals: the present qualitative study did not test an intervention or demonstrate improved outcomes from addressing work-family conflict in rehabilitation.

Subject of Research: Qualitative study of work-family conflict among parents in German psychosomatic rehabilitation

Article Title: “Because you just get stuck in this hamster wheel” – experience and narratives of work-family conflicts among patients in psychosomatic rehabilitation

Article References: Bindels, H., Miluczenko, H., Bethge, M., & Schuler, M. (2026). “Because you just get stuck in this hamster wheel” – experience and narratives of work-family conflicts among patients in psychosomatic rehabilitation. BMC Psychology, 14(1), Article 1362. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05615-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05615-x

Keywords: work-family conflict, psychosomatic rehabilitation, mental disorders, parenting, qualitative interviews, narrative analysis, Germany, patient experience, caregiving, Because, just, stuck

The study, led by Shangjie Meng of Krirk University together with Xingnan Zhan and Chengzhe Guo of Beijing Normal University, drew on responses from 620 Chinese adolescents in grades 7 through 12. Participants completed standardized questionnaires measuring perceived parental psychological control, academic buoyancy, learning engagement, growth mindset, and academic adjustment, the last of these operationalized as investment in school, meaning how much importance students attach to doing well academically. The researchers then tested what statisticians call a moderated serial mediation model, a design that asks not only whether two variables are linked but through what intermediate steps the link flows, and under what conditions those steps weaken or strengthen.

The headline result was stark. Parental psychological control was negatively associated with academic adjustment with a correlation of −0.571, a relationship significant at p < 0.001. In plain terms, adolescents who reported more guilt trips, conditional affection, and domineering tactics at home also reported caring less about, and investing less in, their school lives. But the direct association accounted for only about half of the total. Roughly 49.57 percent of the overall association ran through indirect pathways, meaning the effect of controlling parenting on school adjustment is substantially a story about what happens inside the student’s motivational world.

Those pathways are where the study becomes technically interesting. The first indirect route ran through academic buoyancy, defined by psychologists Andrew Martin and Herbert Marsh as a student’s capacity to handle the everyday setbacks of school life, such as a disappointing test score or routine study stress, as distinct from chronic adversity. Students who perceived more psychological control reported lower buoyancy, and lower buoyancy was associated with poorer adjustment. This pathway accounted for 18.09 percent of the total indirect effect. The second route ran through learning engagement, measured with the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-Student-9, which captures vigor, dedication, and absorption in study. This pathway was slightly larger, accounting for 22.94 percent of the indirect effect.

The third route was a serial chain: psychological control was associated with lower buoyancy, which in turn was associated with lower engagement, which was associated with poorer adjustment. This sequential pathway accounted for 8.56 percent of the total indirect effect. The theoretical logic comes from self-determination theory, the influential framework of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, which holds that human motivation depends on satisfying three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Psychological control, the authors argue, thwarts all three. A teenager who learns to appease parents or avoid anxiety, rather than to pursue genuine interest, may experience learning as an imposed obligation rather than a self-directed activity, draining the psychological resources needed to bounce back from academic hassles and to engage deeply with schoolwork.

The most striking finding, however, concerns what moderates these associations: growth mindset, Carol Dweck’s construct describing the belief that intelligence and abilities are malleable and can be developed through effort. Using the PROCESS macro with 5,000 bootstrap resamples, the researchers found that the negative associations between psychological control and adjustment, buoyancy, and engagement were all significantly weaker among adolescents with stronger growth mindsets. The interaction terms were positive and significant in all three regression equations, and the indices of moderated mediation confirmed that the indirect pathways themselves varied across mindset levels. Simple slope analyses made the pattern concrete: at low growth mindset, the association between psychological control and buoyancy was β = −0.535, while at high growth mindset it softened to β = −0.261. For the direct association with adjustment, the slope shrank from −0.368 to −0.110 across the same range.

The interpretation the authors offer is that adolescents with a growth mindset may appraise controlling parenting as a manageable external condition rather than a verdict on their worth. When a setback or a parent’s critical pressure arrives, these students are more likely to frame it as an opportunity to develop mastery rather than an attack on self-esteem, preserving their sense of competence and their willingness to keep engaging. This aligns with earlier work by David Yeager and Carol Dweck arguing that growth mindset interventions work partly by coaching people to reframe challenges as avenues for growth rather than threats. It also echoes a 2024 study of left-behind middle school students in China, which found that growth mindset buffered the association between cumulative risk and academic adjustment.

The methodological scaffolding behind these claims is reasonably careful. The measurement instruments, including the Chinese adaptation of Barber’s Parental Psychological Control Scale and Dweck’s Implicit Theories of Intelligence Scale, all showed strong internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values between 0.881 and 0.945. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated good model fit, and tests for common method bias, collinearity, and discriminant validity all came back acceptable. The authors are candid, though, about the study’s limits. The design is cross-sectional, so it cannot establish that controlling parenting causes poorer adjustment, that buoyancy precedes engagement in time, or that mindset causally protects students. The sample was recruited by convenience, all data were self-reported, and academic adjustment was captured only through investment in school rather than the full breadth of the construct.

Even with those caveats, the implications are hard to ignore. For parents, the findings suggest that guilt induction and love withdrawal, tactics that can feel effective in the moment, are associated with eroding exactly the psychological resources, resilience and engagement, that adolescents need to succeed. For educators and counselors, the results point to academic buoyancy and learning engagement as promising targets for intervention, and to growth mindset as a potential amplifier of protective programs. The authors explicitly frame their work as hypothesis-generating: future longitudinal and intervention studies are needed to test whether reducing psychological control, strengthening need-supportive parenting, or combining mindset training with family support actually improves adolescents’ academic adjustment over time.

What makes the study resonate beyond the statistics is its portrait of adolescence as a developmental window in which autonomy is not a luxury but a need. Self-determination theory has long predicted that controlling environments undercut intrinsic motivation, and this research adds a detailed, quantified picture of how that plays out in the classroom, from the family dinner table through a student’s daily resilience to their engagement with homework. The message for parents may be uncomfortable but clear: pressure applied through psychological strings tends to fray them, while belief in a teenager’s capacity to grow appears to help those strings hold. As the authors conclude, the pathways they identified now await the longitudinal and experimental designs that can turn a compelling pattern of associations into a tested causal story.

Subject of Research: The association between parental psychological control and adolescents' academic adjustment, mediated by academic buoyancy and learning engagement and moderated by growth mindset

Article Title: Parental psychological control and adolescents’ academic adjustment: a moderated serial mediation model

Article References: Meng, S., Zhan, X., & Guo, C. (2026). Parental psychological control and adolescents’ academic adjustment: a moderated serial mediation model. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1910535. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1910535

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1910535

Keywords: parental psychological control, academic adjustment, adolescents, academic buoyancy, learning engagement, growth mindset, self-determination theory, mediation analysis, educational psychology, parenting, China, resilience

The intervention, known as the Early Childhood Development Parenting Readiness Education Program, or ECD PREP, was embedded directly into the flow of primary healthcare services. Rather than asking parents to attend separate classes at distant venues, the program integrated responsive caregiving education into the same visits where mothers already receive antenatal care, delivery services, and postnatal care. This design choice matters technically: it exploits existing contact points between families and the health system, which is precisely where scalability becomes possible in resource-constrained settings.

Responsive caregiving during the earliest years of life is considered foundational by developmental scientists. The concept covers a parent’s ability to read an infant’s cues, whether a cry signals hunger, discomfort, or overstimulation, and to answer those signals promptly and appropriately. Decades of research link this pattern of interaction to stronger physical growth, cognitive attainment, and socio-emotional adjustment, and it strengthens the parent-child relationship at a stage when the brain is developing at its fastest rate. Healthcare settings, the study’s authors argue, can serve as a hub for promoting and scaling up responsive caregiving among parents who might otherwise never encounter such guidance.

To test whether clinic-based education could actually shift these behaviors, the research team recruited 423 participants, 324 from Pakistan and 99 from Afghanistan, across six field sites, four in Pakistan and two in Afghanistan. The sites were assigned using a controlled allocation: two Pakistani fields and one Afghan field delivered the intervention, while an equal number served as control sites offering standard care. Participants were enrolled through convenience sampling, and the study formed the sequential mixed-method arm of a broader implementation research effort led by teams at Aga Khan University in Karachi and Aga Khan Health Services in Kabul, with funding from the Aga Khan Foundation’s Foundations for Health and Empowerment initiative in partnership with Global Affairs Canada.

The quantitative battery was deliberately multi-dimensional. Parenting confidence was measured with the Karitane Parenting Confidence Scale, a validated instrument that captures a parent’s self-assessed competence in soothing, feeding, and understanding their infant. Overall wellbeing was assessed with the World Health Organization Quality of Life scale, and newborn responsive interaction was scored with the ECD PREP newborn responsive interaction scale, which evaluates observable dimensions of parent-infant exchange. A basic demographics questionnaire rounded out the instruments. Quantitative data were analyzed in SPSS, while qualitative interviews with parents and healthcare professionals were analyzed manually to extract themes about the program’s perceived value.

The numbers tell a striking story. Parents who received the clinic-based education scored significantly higher on parenting confidence than controls, 34.57 plus or minus 6.44 versus 32.52 plus or minus 6.3, a mean difference of 2.05 with a p-value below 0.001. The gap on newborn responsive interaction was even larger in practical terms: 17.89 plus or minus 2.32 in the intervention group against 15.37 plus or minus 4.33 among controls, a mean difference of 2.52, again with p below 0.001. Notably, the standard deviation among intervention parents was roughly half that of the control group on the interaction scale, suggesting that the program did not merely lift the average but also narrowed the spread, raising the floor for parents who might otherwise have struggled most with reading infant cues.

The qualitative interviews added texture that the statistics alone cannot convey. Parents described the intervention as beneficial in two specific ways: it taught them what responsive parenting actually looks like in daily practice, and it helped them develop strong attachment with their newborns. Healthcare professionals, for their part, agreed that the program enhanced their own skills and knowledge in responsive caregiving, an important secondary finding because it indicates the education flows in both directions. When clinic staff feel more capable of coaching families, the intervention becomes self-reinforcing rather than dependent on a single training event.

These results carry weight beyond the study sites. Pakistan and Afghanistan together account for a substantial share of the world’s children growing up in conditions where early stimulation and responsive care are rarely discussed in formal terms, and where the health system is often the only institution in regular contact with new mothers during the first weeks of life. By demonstrating that a continuous, structured parenting education stream can be run inside existing primary healthcare infrastructure, the study provides a template that other low- and middle-income countries could adapt without building new programs from scratch. The finding that confidence and interaction both improved also aligns with a broader technical principle in behavior change: self-efficacy and practice tend to rise together when education is repeated across multiple routine contacts rather than delivered once.

The authors are careful about the study’s design boundaries. Convenience sampling means the participants were not randomly drawn from the general population, and the allocation of sites rather than individuals introduces the possibility of site-level differences influencing outcomes. The published version is also an early-release, peer-reviewed accepted manuscript that remains subject to further editorial refinement. Still, the consistency of the quantitative differences across two countries, combined with converging qualitative themes from both parents and healthcare professionals, strengthens the case that the observed effects reflect the intervention itself rather than local idiosyncrasies.

The study’s central conclusion is direct: a continuous structured parenting education intervention in healthcare settings can improve parental practices in ways that contribute to optimal child development. The authors therefore emphasize the need to integrate parenting education programs at all levels of healthcare settings, from community outreach to facility-based services. For the 423 families who took part, the program changed how they responded to their newborns in the earliest days of life. For health systems across the region, the message is that the same clinics already delivering vaccines and postnatal checkups can, with modest additions, become the front line of the science of responsive caregiving, turning every routine visit into an opportunity to build the parent-child bond that underpins a lifetime of development.

Subject of Research: Pediatrics

Article Title: Newborn parenting education in primary healthcare settings of Pakistan and Afghanistan: impact on confidence and interactions

Article References: Bhamani, S., Nadeem, S., Shams, M., Tikmani, S. S., Aslam, K., Choudhry, S., Jiwa, B., Maab, A., & Delawar, G. (2026). Newborn parenting education in primary healthcare settings of Pakistan and Afghanistan: impact on confidence and interactions. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07587-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07587-8

Keywords: responsive caregiving, parenting education, primary healthcare, early childhood development, Pakistan, Afghanistan, newborn care, parent-child interaction, Newborn, parenting, education, primary

The research team, led by Neelam Punjani, Amber Hussain, and Shannon D. Scott at the Faculty of Nursing, set out to address a persistent gap in child health communication. Comprehensive sexuality education has long been recognized as a protective factor for young people, but its effectiveness depends heavily on what happens at home. When parents avoid or fumble conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity, children may be left to piece together information from less reliable sources. The team’s response was to build digital knowledge translation tools: short, animated, narrative-based videos designed specifically for parents rather than for children or clinicians.

Knowledge translation, often abbreviated as KT in health research, refers to the disciplined process of turning scientific evidence into formats that real audiences can actually absorb and act on. For sensitive or stigmatized subjects, traditional written guidance often falls short, because the material can feel clinical, judgmental, or simply overwhelming. Arts-based approaches, including animation and visual storytelling, have shown promise in these contexts by lowering emotional defenses and creating a sense of narrative safety. Viewers can watch characters navigate difficult moments without feeling personally interrogated, which makes the format particularly well suited to topics that many adults find awkward to discuss.

To build the videos, the researchers followed the ARCHE-ECHO KT Tool Development Cycle, a structured framework developed at the Alberta Research Centre for Health Evidence as part of the Evidence in Child Health to enhance Outcomes program. The cycle emphasizes user-centred, iterative refinement: content is drafted from primary qualitative research, reviewed with intended end users, revised, and tested again rather than released as a one-shot product. In this case, the two videos were grounded in earlier qualitative work with Canadian parents, ensuring that the scenarios, language, and emotional beats reflected the actual concerns and uncertainties parents had voiced rather than assumptions made by the research team.

The evaluation used a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, meaning quantitative results were collected first and then explored in greater depth through qualitative follow-up. Twenty-four parents completed structured usability testing that included the System Usability Scale, a widely used ten-item instrument that scores perceived ease of use on a scale from zero to one hundred, along with knowledge translation evaluation subscales and four pre-post visual analogue scale items. Those VAS items captured self-rated changes in understanding of gender diversity, comfort discussing sexual orientation and gender identity, confidence responding to children’s questions, and the likelihood of initiating such conversations at home.

The numbers were striking. The two videos earned mean System Usability Scale scores of 82.4 and 79.8, both comfortably above the 68-point threshold conventionally interpreted as above-average usability. Paired t-tests comparing pre- and post-viewing ratings showed significant improvements across every outcome measured, with p-values below .001 for all four VAS items. In practical terms, parents did not merely find the videos pleasant to watch; they reported measurable gains in comprehension, emotional readiness, and self-assessed willingness to open conversations with their own children.

Eight of the participants then joined focus group discussions, and the thematic analysis of those conversations revealed five major themes. Parents described increased confidence and knowledge after viewing the animations. They attributed their emotional and cognitive engagement to the arts-based design, noting that narrative and visual elements made abstract concepts feel concrete and relatable. They also expressed a desire for ongoing support and community resources beyond the videos themselves, underscoring that a two-minute animation can open a door but cannot sustain a lifelong dialogue on its own. A fourth theme highlighted the value of inclusive representation, with participants responding positively to seeing diverse families and identities reflected on screen. The final theme captured areas for improvement, including concrete suggestions for future iterations.

Those suggestions carried real design weight. Participants recommended adding multilingual captions so that the tools could serve families whose first language is not English, and they called for age-specific adaptations, recognizing that a conversation with a six-year-old differs fundamentally from one with a teenager. The researchers acknowledge these limits in their conclusions, noting that future work should examine the long-term effects of the tools and develop multilingual, culturally responsive versions to broaden accessibility. The study also involved a relatively small sample of twenty-four usability testers, which is appropriate for a formative usability evaluation but leaves questions about generalizability and behavioral follow-through for larger trials.

What makes the findings notable beyond this specific topic is the methodological template they offer. Sensitive child health subjects, from mental health to bullying to substance use, often stall at the same bottleneck: parents who care deeply but feel unequipped. The combination of a rigorous development cycle, standardized usability metrics, and mixed-methods evaluation provides a reproducible pathway for building and validating communication tools in other domains. The authors suggest that arts-based knowledge translation tools may complement existing sexuality education efforts and strengthen culturally responsive public health communication more broadly, positioning animation not as a gimmick but as a serious instrument for evidence dissemination.

The study, conducted with ethics approval from the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board and carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, arrives at a moment when demand for accessible, evidence-based parenting resources on gender and sexuality continues to grow. Its core message is deceptively simple: when parents are given the right narrative tools, their confidence and willingness to engage rise measurably, and the hardest conversations become a little easier to start. As the research team looks toward multilingual versions and longitudinal testing, the videos stand as an early demonstration that visual storytelling, rigorously tested, can translate complex evidence into everyday family conversation.

Subject of Research: Development and usability testing of animated digital knowledge translation tools for parents on sexual orientation and gender identity

Article Title: Development and usability testing of digital knowledge translation tools for parents on sexual orientation and gender identity

Article References: Punjani, N., Hussain, A., & Scott, S. D. (2026). Development and usability testing of digital knowledge translation tools for parents on sexual orientation and gender identity. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07622-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07622-8

Keywords: sexual orientation, gender identity, knowledge translation, animated videos, usability testing, parenting, sexuality education, child health, arts-based methods, digital health tools, BMC Pediatrics, public health communication

The research team, led by Peter Walsh, Behavioral Research Coordinator in the Foster Health Lab at Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute, set out to capture safety challenges as they unfolded in real time rather than reconstructing them months later in a clinic. The study enrolled a national sample of twenty-one parents of children with medical complexity who spoke English or Spanish. Over the course of one week, participants responded to twice-daily surveys that solicited text messages describing their child’s tube-related care. The method, known as ecological momentary assessment, is designed to catch experiences while they are fresh, before memory smooths over the small failures and near misses that rarely make it into medical records. Parents were also encouraged to submit photographs or audio recordings of the problems they encountered, adding a rich sensory layer to the data. Afterward, researchers interviewed each parent to discuss their messages in greater depth.

What emerged from this intensive week of documentation was a portrait of parents as de facto safety engineers for their children’s home medical systems. The researchers found that parents navigate patient safety challenges during daily tube-related care and actively create strategies to mitigate risks. Strikingly, most of these challenges and the improvised solutions that followed were never shared with the child’s care team. The professional clinicians who prescribed the equipment and designed the care plans were largely unaware of both the hazards their patients faced at home and the workarounds families had invented to manage them.

The safety challenges clustered into three dominant categories. Supply issues accounted for twenty-four percent of reported problems, encompassing difficulties obtaining tube- and medication-related supplies, medications, or equipment. For families dependent on a steady stream of specialized items, a delayed shipment or an insurance denial can interrupt a feeding schedule or a medication routine with immediate clinical consequences. Devices not working as intended made up twenty-two percent of the challenges. Parents described feeding pumps that ran inconsistently or incorrectly and medication syringes that broke during use, failures that strike at the heart of a system in which precise dosing and delivery are everything. The third category, irregularities in care experienced as normal, accounted for twenty percent. One parent described how their child’s feeding tube would constantly wrap around them overnight, a recurring hazard that had become such a routine feature of family life that it no longer registered as a problem worth reporting.

That last category may be the most consequential finding of the study. When irregularities become normalized, they disappear from the radar of both the family and the care team. A tube that tangles nightly is not a crisis in any single moment, but it represents a persistent risk that no clinician ever gets the chance to address. The study suggests that the most common safety issues in home-based pediatric care are precisely the kind of chronic, low-grade problems that fall through the cracks of episodic clinical visits, visible only to the parents living with them every day.

Despite the absence of formal guidance, parents were not passive in the face of these hazards. Across the study, participants created systematic operations to prevent adverse events within routine care. They developed checks, routines, and habits that functioned as informal safety protocols, adapted to the specific quirks of their child’s equipment and their household’s rhythms. The researchers characterized these efforts as creative and resourceful, and the characterization is well earned. Parents effectively designed their own quality-control systems without training in human factors engineering or patient safety science, iterating through trial and error in the high-stakes environment of their own living rooms.

Lead author Peter Walsh acknowledged this expertise while pointing to its limits. Our findings highlight parental ingenuity and resourcefulness in developing strategies to tackle safety challenges that often arise during their child’s at-home care, such as medical supply issues or malfunctioning devices, he said. While that is commendable and we acknowledge that parents are experts in what their own child needs, he added, stronger partnership and communication between the care team and parents would raise awareness of common safety concerns and help generate solutions, which in turn could be shared with other parents during training. Ideally, these conversations would begin when the medical devices are prescribed so that safety events could be prevented. Ongoing dialogue would also help decrease parental isolation and generally maintain a safer environment for children with medical complexity.

The vision Walsh describes treats parents not as passive recipients of instructions but as partners whose hard-won knowledge should flow back into the system. A workaround discovered by one family in one state could, in principle, spare dozens of other families the same trial-and-error process, if only there were a channel to carry it. The study’s authors argue that such a channel should be built deliberately, starting at the moment of prescription rather than after a preventable event has already occurred. Continuous communication, rather than occasional check-ins, would allow emerging hazards to surface early and solutions to circulate widely.

Senior author Carolyn Foster, MD, MS, Director of the Health@Home Initiative at Manne Research Institute and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, framed the practical implications for the healthcare system. Our research suggests that proactive measures are necessary, such as offering parents tips about handling frequently encountered safety issues so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time, she said. Care plans also need to be simplified when possible and tailored to each family’s unique needs. Most importantly, constructing support systems where parents know who to call if they face challenges is essential for advancing at-home care safety.

The study was supported by grant 1R18HS029638-01 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Foster is the Yaeger Family Research Scholar at Lurie Children’s. As home-based care for medically complex children continues to expand, the research points to a structural truth about modern pediatrics: the safety of the most vulnerable patients increasingly rests on the shoulders of untrained caregivers improvising alone. Closing the loop between those caregivers and the clinical teams who depend on them may be one of the most straightforward ways to prevent harm, and the parents in this study have already shown that they are ready to contribute what they know, if the system is ready to listen.

Subject of Research: Safety challenges and parent-developed solutions in at-home care for children with medical complexity

Article Title: Parents of kids who need complex medical care at home tend to resolve frequent safety issues on their own, study finds

Article References: Parents of kids who need complex medical care at home tend to resolve frequent safety issues on their own, study finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: children with medical complexity, home-based care, patient safety, tube feeding, medical devices, parenting, Pediatrics journal, Lurie Children's Hospital, caregiver burden, healthcare communication, medical supplies, care teams

The research, conducted by Junsong Qian and Guiping Wang of Hebei Normal University and published in the journal Current Psychology, surveyed 1,203 adolescents from three Chinese provinces: Henan, Hebei, and Fujian. The sample included 49.3 percent boys and spanned both junior high school students, who made up 68.9 percent of participants, and senior high school students, who accounted for 31.1 percent. Data were collected in 2025, with ethical approval from the researchers’ university and informed consent obtained from school administrators and parents before questionnaires were administered anonymously. The breadth of the sample matters, because previous work on parental rejection and test anxiety in China has often relied on smaller or more localized groups.

What distinguishes the new study methodologically is its use of latent profile analysis, a statistical technique that sorts individuals into unobserved subgroups based on their patterns of responses. Traditional variable-centered approaches — correlations and regressions — ask whether parental rejection, averaged across a whole sample, predicts test anxiety on average. Latent profile analysis instead asks whether different configurations of rejection exist within the same population. A teenager might perceive both parents as rejecting, neither, or one but not the other, and those configurations could have different psychological consequences. Rooted theoretically in John Bowlby’s attachment theory and in Rohner’s parental acceptance-rejection theory, the analysis treated maternal and paternal behavior as potentially separable streams of influence rather than a single undifferentiated family climate.

The results revealed four distinct profiles. The largest, containing 66.67 percent of adolescents, was labeled Low Parental Rejection: these teenagers perceived generally accepting behavior from both parents. Three smaller groups followed. The High Paternal-Low Maternal Rejection profile, comprising 13.30 percent of the sample, captured adolescents who experienced their fathers as substantially more rejecting than their mothers. The mirror image, Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection, included 11.97 percent. Finally, 8.06 percent of adolescents fell into the High Parental Rejection group, perceiving rejection from both parents. Each of these profiles differed significantly from the others in both test anxiety and sense of security, confirming that the configuration of rejection — not merely its presence or absence — tracks emotional outcomes.

One demographic pattern stood out. Girls were significantly more likely than boys to be classified into the Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection profile, suggesting that in these Chinese families, daughters disproportionately shoulder the experience of a rejecting mother alongside a comparatively warmer father. The researchers note that this aligns with a broader literature on gendered parenting dynamics in Chinese societies, where fathers’ involvement has historically been thinner and mothers often serve as the primary — and sometimes the harshest — daily disciplinarians. Intriguingly, however, the pathways linking profile membership to test anxiety did not differ by gender, indicating that whatever a teenager’s sex, the underlying psychological route from rejection to exam fear appears to operate in much the same way.

That route runs through the sense of security. Using the Low Parental Rejection group as the statistical reference, the researchers tested whether each of the other three profiles influenced test anxiety indirectly by eroding adolescents’ feelings of safety and predictability in the world. The mediation analyses confirmed this pattern for all three elevated-rejection profiles: adolescents in these groups reported lower sense of security, and lower security in turn predicted higher test anxiety. The concept of sense of security, as measured in Chinese psychological research, reflects a stable inner confidence that one’s environment is dependable and that one can cope with its demands. When parents — the earliest and most powerful guarantors of that dependability — communicate coldness, hostility, or indifference, the child’s basic assumption of safety is undermined.

The consequences surface acutely in examination settings. Test anxiety involves worry components, such as intrusive catastrophic thoughts about failure, and emotionality components, such as physiological arousal. A secure adolescent can frame an exam as a challenge to be met; an insecure one may experience it as a threat to an already fragile sense of worth. Attachment theory offers a coherent account of why. Early caregiving experiences are internalized as working models of self and others, and those models shape how ambiguous, high-stakes situations are appraised. A rejection-based model primes threat appraisals, and threat appraisals are precisely the cognitive engine of anxiety before and during tests.

Equally notable were the comparisons the mediation analysis did not find. There were no significant differences between the mediating pathways of the High Paternal-Low Maternal and Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection profiles. In other words, from the adolescent’s perspective, rejection by a father appears roughly as damaging to security — and thus to exam composure — as rejection by a mother. This finding challenges any assumption that maternal warmth is uniquely decisive and adds weight to the parental acceptance-rejection tradition, which holds that rejection from either attachment figure carries comparable developmental costs. For family systems theorists, it also underscores that children integrate parental behavior configurally: what matters is the overall pattern of acceptance and rejection, not which parent supplies it.

The authors draw a practical conclusion that departs from much conventional advice. Interventions aimed at reducing adolescent test anxiety, they argue, should not target one parent in isolation. Instead, they should promote coordinated parenting patterns in which both mother and father provide acceptance, and they should explicitly work to strengthen the adolescent’s sense of security. In the Chinese context, where high-stakes examinations such as the zhongkao and gaokao exert enormous pressure on families, this reframing is significant. It suggests that counseling services and school-based programs may achieve more by treating the family’s relational climate as a unit — and by building teenagers’ inner confidence in the dependability of their world — than by addressing the mother’s or the father’s behavior separately.

The study’s limitations invite cautious interpretation. Its cross-sectional design, with all measures collected in a single wave in 2025, cannot prove the direction of causality: anxious adolescents may also perceive their parents more negatively, or insecurity may color both perceptions of rejection and exam fear. Self-report questionnaires remain vulnerable to shared-method bias, and the sample, though large, was drawn from three provinces and may not generalize to all Chinese regions or to other cultures. The data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, subject to privacy and ethical restrictions, allowing qualified researchers to scrutinize the analyses. Even with these caveats, the latent profile approach offers a valuable refinement: instead of asking whether parental rejection matters for test anxiety, it maps the specific shapes rejection takes in real families — and shows that whichever shape it takes, the erosion of a child’s sense of security is the channel through which exam-room dread follows.

Subject of Research: Latent profiles of parental rejection and their association with test anxiety mediated by sense of security in Chinese adolescents

Article Title: The relationship between latent profiles of parental rejection and Chinese adolescents’ test anxiety: the mediating role of sense of security

Article References: Qian, J., & Wang, G. (2026). The relationship between latent profiles of parental rejection and Chinese adolescents’ test anxiety: the mediating role of sense of security. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1427. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09972-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09972-z

Keywords: parental rejection, test anxiety, adolescents, sense of security, latent profile analysis, attachment theory, Chinese families, mediation analysis, parenting, mental health, educational psychology, relationship

The study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders by Catalina Sau Man Ng and Victor C. W. Chan of The Education University of Hong Kong together with Olivier Marchal of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, recruited 92 Chinese parents in Hong Kong, including 42 parents of children with a formal autism diagnosis and 50 parents of typically developing children. The two groups were well matched on key sociodemographic variables, with no statistically significant differences, which strengthens the comparison. Most participants were mothers, 83.5 percent, aged between 24 and 62, married, and raising more than one child. Parents of autistic children were recruited through private learning enrichment centres, while parents of typically developing children came through kindergartens and mainstream primary schools.

The technical machinery of the study rested on three standardized instruments. Parenting stress was measured with the 18-item Parental Stress Scale, which captures both the rewarding and the punishing sides of the parenting role and showed good internal consistency in this sample with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.83. Coping was assessed with the 28-item Brief COPE, grouped into problem-focused strategies such as active coping, planning and instrumental support, emotion-focused strategies such as acceptance, positive reframing and religion, and dysfunctional strategies such as venting, denial, self-blame and behavioral disengagement. Psychological well-being was measured with the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales, the DASS-42, which rates symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress over the past week and showed excellent internal consistency here, with alphas above 0.94 for every subscale.

The headline numbers are stark. Parents of children with autism scored significantly higher on parenting stress than the comparison group, with a mean difference whose 95 percent confidence interval ranged from about 10.8 down to 4.9 points, and p less than 0.001. They also scored significantly higher on all three DASS-42 dimensions, stress, anxiety and depression, each with p less than 0.001. And in a finding that complicates simple narratives, they reported significantly greater use of all three coping categories, problem-focused, emotion-focused and dysfunctional, compared with parents of typically developing children. They were not coping less. They were coping more, on every front, and still drowning.

Correlational analyses revealed the psychological fault lines. Higher parenting stress was significantly and positively associated with dysfunctional coping, with a correlation coefficient of 0.373, and with stress, anxiety and depression on the DASS-42, with coefficients of 0.539, 0.465 and 0.424 respectively. Both emotion-focused and dysfunctional coping tracked with psychological distress. Problem-focused coping, by contrast, was not significantly associated with any of the DASS-42 subscales, meaning that even proactive, practical efforts to manage caregiving demands did not translate into measurable relief from depression, anxiety or stress in this cross-sectional snapshot.

Then come the subgroup findings, the ones the researchers themselves describe as unexpected. Elevated parenting stress among parents of autistic children was consistent across all education levels, from secondary schooling through polytechnic and pre-university qualifications to Bachelor’s degrees and above. Among the most educated parents, the autism group scored significantly higher on all DASS-42 subscales, though their coping strategies did not differ from the comparison group. The pattern repeated at the extremes of household income. In the highest bracket, at or above HK$40,000 per month, parents of autistic children reported significantly higher parenting stress and elevated scores on stress, anxiety and depression. In the lowest bracket examined, HK$10,000 to HK$19,999, they showed significantly higher parenting stress along with elevated stress and depression. Only in the middle income range, HK$20,000 to HK$39,999, did the autism group report significantly greater use of both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping, and even there their DASS-42 stress scores were higher.

Why would education and money fail as buffers? The researchers point to the cultural architecture of Chinese parenting. The concept of guan, parental control, places responsibility for a child’s behavior squarely on the parent, so a child’s tantrums, self-injury or aggression are internalized not just as caregiving strain but as personal failure. The concept of mian zi, face, frames an autism diagnosis as a loss of face for the family, exposing parents to stigma from peers, colleagues and extended kin. Previous qualitative work by the same team documented how Chinese parents experience this affiliate stigma, and how it channels them toward emotion-focused strategies such as acceptance or withdrawal while discouraging disclosure or help-seeking. A meta-analysis cited in the paper found that 70 percent of mothers of children with autism experienced clinically significant parenting stress, and evidence from Singapore, Oman and Greece points the same direction.

The theoretical spine of the study is Lazarus and Folkman’s stress and coping model from 1984, which distinguishes problem-focused coping, aimed at altering the stressor itself, from emotion-focused coping, aimed at regulating the emotional response. Prior evidence on which strategies parents of autistic children actually use has been mixed. Some studies highlight adaptive approaches such as cognitive reframing and social support, others emphasize avoidance and disengagement, and still others find both coexisting. The Hong Kong data add a distinctive twist, showing that Chinese parents deploy the full coping repertoire simultaneously, with proactive problem-solving coexisting alongside persistent emotional strain and maladaptive habits. The authors suggest that more educated parents may have heightened awareness of their child’s developmental challenges, leading to greater emotional investment, higher expectations and deeper internalization of responsibility, while affluent parents may face intensified social comparison within their communities.

The implications reach beyond Hong Kong. Autism prevalence is rising in the city, and the authors argue that support systems must prioritize the psychological well-being and caregiving needs of parents rather than relying on socioeconomic indicators to decide who deserves help. Practitioners, they suggest, should deliver accessible interventions that strengthen adaptive coping across all education and income levels, integrating practical stress-management skills with culturally informed psychoeducation that acknowledges stigma, community judgment and concerns about family reputation. Because parental well-being exerts a ripple effect on child development and family dynamics, untreated parental distress risks compounding the very behavioral challenges that generate it in the first place.

The study carries caveats that temper its reach. The sample was small, at 92 participants, and subgroup analyses, particularly in the lowest income bracket, were constrained by limited statistical power. Recruiting autism parents from private enrichment centres may have skewed the sample toward higher socioeconomic families, and the cross-sectional design rules out causal claims about whether stress drives coping choices or the reverse. Self-report measures invite response bias, and the instruments used non-uniform reference windows, with the DASS-42 asking about the past week while the Parental Stress Scale and Brief COPE specify none. The authors call for larger, longitudinal and mixed-methods studies to trace how stress, coping and well-being evolve over time. Still, the core message stands with unusual clarity. In one of the world’s most affluent cities, among parents of every educational stripe, raising an autistic child in a culture that ties parental worth to a child’s behavior and a family’s face to a diagnosis exacts a psychological price that no income bracket has yet managed to pay down.

Subject of Research: Parenting stress, coping and psychological well-being among Chinese parents of children with autism in Hong Kong

Article Title: Parenting Stress, Coping and Well-Being Among Chinese Parents of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Article References: Ng, C. S. M., Marchal, O., & Chan, V. C. W. (2026). Parenting Stress, Coping and Well-Being Among Chinese Parents of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07577-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07577-w

Keywords: parenting stress, autism spectrum disorder, coping strategies, psychological well-being, Hong Kong, Chinese parents, affiliate stigma, mental health, Parenting, Stress, Coping, Well-Being