The effect of low parental warmth and low monitoring on disordered eating in mid-adolescence: findings from the Australian Temperament Project

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the interactions between low parental warmth and monitoring at age 13-14 years and disordered eating attitudes and behaviours at age 15-16 years. METHOD: Data on 1300 (667 females) adolescents and their parents were drawn from The Australian Temperament Project (ATP), a 30 year (15 wave) population based longitudinal study of social-emotional development. Parent participants completed surveys on parenting practices in late childhood, and adolescent participants reported disordered eating using the drive for thinness and bulimia subscales of the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) and an additional body dissatisfaction scale. Interaction was examined on the additive scale by estimating super-additive risk; i.e., risk in excess of the sum of individual risks. RESULTS: For boys, neither parental warmth or monitoring, nor their interaction, was related to disordered eating. For girls, low parental warmth (alone) was associated with bulimic behaviours. In contrast, exposure to both low monitoring and warmth was associated with ∼3½-fold, ∼4-fold and ∼5-fold increases in the odds of reporting body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness and bulimia, respectively. For body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness, risk associated with joint exposure exceeded the sum of individual risks, suggesting an additive interaction between parenting styles. CONCLUSION: Further investment in family-level interventions that focus on promoting parental monitoring behaviour and a warm parent-child relationship remain important strategies for preventing a range of disordered eating behaviours in adolescents.

Promoting the social and emotional health of primary school-aged children: reviewing the evidence base for school-based interventions

Schools are key settings for promoting the social and emotional health and well-being of children. This study investigated the effectiveness of interventions to improve the social and emotional well-being of primary school-aged children. The protocol development stage of the proposed systematic review identified related and comparable research reviews, indicating a more useful review of reviews. Eight reviews of intervention effectiveness covering 322 primary studies were reviewed. The majority examined classroom-based interventions. Greater effectiveness results from a sustained focus on the promotion of mental health, on self-esteem and coping outcomes within the broad school climate, and on replicating positive impacts rather than the prevention of mental health problems. Conclusions are limited by short duration of studies, lack of detail of interventions, identified outcomes and socio-demographic data, and the relationship between processes and outcomes. This study has clearly shown how crucial carefully designed studies are in understanding strategies with potential to impact on the mental health and well-being of children.

Contact with nature and children's mental, emotional, and social health

This research investigated the benefits of children's contact with nature as perceived by adult educators. It was found that contact with nature is perceived to: increase self-confidence and self-esteem; provide opportunities to experience mystery, privacy, and sensory engagement; connect children with school; and accommodate different learning styles and abilities.

Promoting children's social and emotional wellbeing in childcare centers within low socioeconomic areas: strategies, facilitators and challenges

Althought childcare centres have a vital role to play in the social and emotional development of children, the strategies used to promote children’s wellbeing in such settings are not well researched. This study aimed to identify the strategies, facilitators and key challenges for promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing as reported by childcare directors and workers during semi-structured interviews. They reported mainly informal strategies with few formalised policies, curricula or strategies. Staff reported frequent difficulties communicating with parents and/or children due to many families speaking little or no English. Lack of staff training and inadequate resources for activities were other key challenges they identified. Perceived facilitators included staff having strong relationships with each other and sharing a common philosophy, as well as having an open door policy for parents. Systematic development of skills to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing could help leverage childcare staff’s potential to promote children’s wellbeing during a crucial stage of child development.

Family day care educators : an exploration of their understanding and experiences promoting children's social and emotional wellbeing

This study aimed to explore family day care (FDC) educators’ knowledge of child social and emotional wellbeing and mental health problems, the strategies used to promote children’s wellbeing, and barriers and opportunities for promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing. Thirteen FDC educators participated in individual semi-structured interviews. FDC educators were more comfortable defining children’s social and emotional wellbeing than they were in identifying causes and early signs of mental health problems. Strategies used to promote children’s mental health were largely informal and dependent on educator skills and capacities rather than a systematic scheme-wide approach. Common barriers to mental health promotion were limited financial resources, a need for more training and hesitance raising child mental health issues with parents. There is a need to build FDC educators’ knowledge of child social and emotional wellbeing and for tailored mental health promotion strategies in FDC.

Emotional reactions to real-world events in social networks

A convergence of emotions among people in social networks is potentially resulted by the occurrence of an unprecedented event in real world. E.g., a majority of bloggers would react angrily at the September 11 terrorist attacks. Based on this observation, we introduce a sentiment index, computed from the current mood tags in a collection of blog posts utilizing an affective lexicon, potentially revealing subtle events discussed in the blogosphere. We then develop a method for extracting events based on this index and its distribution. Our second contribution is establishment of a new bursty structure in text streams termed a sentiment burst. We employ a stochastic model to detect bursty periods of moods and the events associated. Our results on a dataset of more than 12 million mood-tagged blog posts over a 4-year period have shown that our sentiment-based bursty events are indeed meaningful, in several ways.

Building the capacity of family day care educators to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing : an exploratory cluster randomised controlled trial

Background: Childhood mental health problems are highly prevalent, experienced by one in five children living in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Although childcare settings, including family day care are ideal to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing at a population level in a sustainable way, family day care educators receive limited training in promoting children’s mental health. This study is an exploratory wait-list control cluster randomised controlled trial to test the appropriateness, acceptability, cost, and effectiveness of “Thrive,” an intervention program to build the capacity of family day care educators to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing. Thrive aims to increase educators’ knowledge, confidence and skills in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing.
Methods/Design: This study involves one family day care organisation based in a low socioeconomic area of Melbourne. All family day care educators (term used for registered carers who provide care for children for financial reimbursement in the carers own home) are eligible to participate in the study. The clusters for randomisation will be the fieldworkers (n = 5) who each supervise 10-15 educators. The intervention group (field workers and educators) will participate in a variety of intervention activities over 12 months, including workshops; activity exchanges with other educators; and focused discussion about children’s social and emotional wellbeing during field worker visits. The control group will continue with their normal work practice. The intervention will be delivered to the intervention group and then to the control group after a time delay of 15 months post intervention commencement. A baseline survey will be conducted with all consenting educators and field workers (n = ~70) assessing outcomes at the cluster and individual level. The survey will also be administered at one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. The survey consists of questions measuring perceived levels of knowledge, confidence and skills in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing. As much of this intervention will be delivered by field workers, field worker-family day care educator relationships are key to its success and thus supervisor support will also be measured. All educators will also have an in-home quality of care assessment at baseline, one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. Process evaluation will occur at one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. Information regarding intervention fidelity and economics will also be assessed in the survey.
Discussion: A capacity building intervention in child mental health promotion for family day care is an essential contribution to research, policy and practice. This initiative is the first internationally, and essential in building an evidence base of interventions in this extremely policy-timely setting.

Social and emotional wellbeing in Indigenous Australians: identifying promising interventions

Objective: 

A review of evidence-based evaluation of measures for assessing social and emotional well-being in indigenous Australians

Addressing low levels of social and emotional well-being (SEWB) in Indigenous communities has been a national strategic priority for over 10 years and yet progress in assessing the impact of interventions has been slow. One of the key factors limiting the development of evidence-based practice has been the lack of well-validated instruments to assess SEWB and how it changes over time as a result of intervention. This article systematically reviews available measures, classifying them in terms of the evidence base that exists to support their use. It is concluded that there is an ongoing need to develop psychometrically sound, comprehensive, culturally appropriate measures to operationalise Indigenous SEWB at a population health, programme evaluation, and clinical level. It is suggested that seven pathways be followed to achieve this goal, including the need to recognise that the gold standard status for Indigenous measurement tools cannot be ascribed based on evidence-based assessment criteria alone.

Family day care educators’ knowledge, confidence and skills in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing: baseline data from Thrive

THIS PAPER PRESENTS BASELINE data from Thrive, a capacity-building program for family day care educators. Educators completed a self-report survey assessing knowledge and confidence in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing. An in-home observation was used to assess care quality. Twenty-four educators responded to the survey (40 per cent response rate). They had an average of nine years’ experience and 82 percent held childcare qualifications. Educators reported knowledge of, on average, three early signs of social and emotional problems in children, three risk factors and two protective factors. Using a scale from 0-10, mean educator confidence levels ranged from an average of 6.69 to 7.25. Quality of care ratings were moderate. Although educators had a good understanding of children’s social and emotional wellbeing, the study identified opportunities for significant changes in the quality of the educators’ interactions with children in their care and their professional development.