The Indivisibility of Parental and Child Mental Health and Why Poverty Matters.

Purpose: To ascertain to what extent parental and children's mental health wellbeing are inter-related over time.

Methods: We used a birth cohort study of 5,217 children in Scotland followed up from birth to adolescence. We fitted a Random Intercept Cross-lagged Panel Model for parental mental health and children's conduct problems and emotional symptoms.

Methods for analysing the relationship between poverty, parental work intensity, child emotional symptoms and conduct problems over time.

This article exposes the methods employed to analyse the complex associations between poverty and work intensity over time on the longitudinal trajectories of mental health wellbeing in a cohort of children. This study used data from nine waves of birth cohort 1 of the Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) study (2005/06-2017/18) to fit a bivariate multilevel non-linear growth curve model for the change in conduct problems and emotional symptoms of children over time with the trajectories of poverty and parental work intensity over time as the main covariates of interest. We explain in detail: (a) how we arrive at valid measures for our outcome of interest by testing for longitudinal measurement invariance and (b) the principled approach of growth mixture modelling undertaken to derive our main covariates of interest.

Poverty, parental work intensity and child emotional and conduct problems.

Poverty is known to be associated with poorer child mental wellbeing. Relatedly, the security and quality of employment are reported to affect adult wellbeing. Less is known about how both poverty and parental employment affect children's mental wellbeing.

Playing the long game: A multivariate multilevel non-linear growth curve model of long-term effects in a randomized trial of the Good Behavior Game.

This cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) examined the impact of the Good Behavior Game (GBG) on children's developmental trajectories of disruptive behavior, concentration problems, and prosocial behavior from middle childhood (ages 6-7 years) to early adolescence (ages 10-11 years). Seventy-seven schools in England were randomly assigned to intervention and control groups. Allocation was balanced by school size and the proportion of children eligible for free school meals.