Exploring parental mental health and children’s anxiety
Dr Izaak Lim has been awarded the Barnett Early Parenting Research and Collaboration Grant for his project “The role of fathers in the development of childhood anxiety’.
The project will investigate the unique role fathers play in their children’s lives. It’s an important issue, but there has been less research looking at the important impact of fathers on child development and wellbeing compared to research looking at mothers. From the existing research, it seems that fathers have a different way of parenting and interacting with their children that helps children explore their environment and take risks. It also seems that when mothers have a mental illness, fathers have an important influence on how the family functions and how children develop.
On that background, the study has three main aims:
- to better understand the connection between fathers’ mental health and trauma history to children’s anxiety
- to better understand how parenting and father-child relationship factors influence this connection
- to better understand how father and family relationship factors influence the connection between mothers’ mental health and children’s anxiety.
The research will be undertaken as a new nested study of fathers within the Mercy Pregnancy Emotional Wellbeing Study (MPEWS) and will focus on the early identification of modifiable risk and protective factors associated with childhood anxiety disorders.
Said Izaak, "If we find that paternal emotional disorders in early life predict the development of anxiety disorders in middle childhood, this may change our approach to perinatal and early in life mental health services, to ensure that fathers’ mental health is more actively considered in assessment and treatment. Similarly, if we find that the quality of the father-child relationship confers some protection against the development of childhood anxiety, this may stimulate infant and early childhood mental health services to develop more father-inclusive (indeed, father-engaging) models of care, noting that fathers are largely absent when it comes to perinatal, infant and early child mental health treatment settings."
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