Parents view their adolescents' mental health.

A 40-item behavioral checklist was devised for use with adolescent patient and nonpatient samples. A comparable form is used to obtain information about the offspring from the parent or guardian. This report presents the responses of parents and compares them with those of their offspring in two samples. Parents of disturbed adolescents reported a significantly greater frequency of emotional-behavioral problems in their offspring than did parents of a medical sample, whereas the two samples of adolescents reported equivalent frequency of problems. Parental responses to items were clustered into six subscales. Effects of race and sex of the adolescent on subscale scores were investigated. Black parents in both samples reported fewer and less frequent problems than did white parents; in contrast, the black teenagers' reports were similar to the white except for the Affective Distress subscale. Parents and adolescents in both samples reported higher scores for girls than boys on this subscale.