Parent help-seeking behaviour: Examining the impact of parent beliefs on professional help-seeking for child emotional and behavioural difficulties

Abstract

For children experiencing emotional and behavioural difficulties, parents are key gatekeepers to treatment access. However, despite the substantial prevalence of child mental health problems in Australia, there remains a significant disparity between the rate of children requiring treatment and the rate of parents actively seeking professional help for their child. Therefore, an understanding of factors impacting on parents’ help-seeking behaviour is crucial. The current study presents exploratory research examining the impact of parent beliefs on help-seeking behaviour. Specifically, this study aims to explore parent beliefs about (a) barriers to help-seeking (b) parenting ability, and (c) the causes and nature of child difficulties. Participants in this study were a sample of 399 Australian parents of children aged from 4 to 14 years, with each parent completing a series of four structured questionnaires. Results indicated that parents who had not sought help for their child perceived significantly more barriers to help seeking and held significantly stronger beliefs that child emotional and behavioural difficulties are intentional. Results also indicated that as parents’ sense of competence increased, perceived barriers to help seeking decreased. Perceived barriers to help seeking also decreased as parent beliefs that child difficulties are stable decreased. The present study presents several implications for informing effective engagement strategies to improve service utilisation, highlighting directions for future hypothesis-driven research.

Keywords::

• parent help seeking
• childhood
• emotional and behavioural problems
• service engagement
• developmental psychology

Acknowledgments

None.

Financial support

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Conflicts of interest

None.

Ethical standards

The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.