Abstract
BackgroundThe European literature on mental health of the children of immigrants is limited. Therefore this study aims to investigate gender-specific mental health reported by teachers, parents and the children themselves in 12-year old children of immigrants and non-immigrants and also to study the level of agreement between the different informants.MethodsThis cross-sectional study is a part of the longitudinal South East Sweden Birth Cohort-study (the SESBiC-study) on children’s health. All children born in town in the south of Sweden 1995-1996 were invited to take part. The mothers of 1723 children (88%) consented. In this part 87 Swedish-born 12-year old children of immigrants and 687 12-year old children of non-immigrants were investigated regarding gender-specific differences in mental health as reported by teachers (Teacher-report form), parents (Child behavior checklist), and children (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) and the agreement reached between the informants.ResultsParental immigrant status was not associated with mental health in any of the groups, but living arrangements and parental educational level were mainly found to have an effect on the health status of boys (TRF-Internalizing β = .77 95% CI = .02-1.52; TRF-Externalizing.β = 2.31 95% CI = .63-3.99; TRF-Total β = 6.22 95% CI = 2.27-10.18) The agreement between different informants was generally low, except for externalizing problems among boys (Boys of immigrant parents: Parent and teacher correlation ρ = .422 and Child teacher correlation ρ = .524, p-value < .05, respectively). The correlation between teachers and parents were lower in the index group compared to the reference group. In the index group, the correlations between teacher’s and children’s assessments were fairly high for boys but not for girls (ρ Total = .400, ρ Internalizing = .240 and ρ Externalizing = .524, p-value < .05 for Total and Externalizing).ConclusionThis study confirms previous findings that the mental health of children of immigrants is similar to that of children of non-immigrants. We found that family factors have a greater impact on the reported mental health than immigrant status does. This might be of clinical importance for healthcare workers to recognize when investigating and treating children from other cultures.
Highlights
The European literature on mental health of the children of immigrants is limited
In the multivariate analysis, immigrant status was not associated with mental health in any of the reports, but in line with other studies [33], parent’s educational level and living arrangements were
This indicates that family factors matter more than the parents’ immigrant status in determining mental health in children of immigrants at the age of 12 in Sweden
Summary
The European literature on mental health of the children of immigrants is limited. this study aims to investigate gender-specific mental health reported by teachers, parents and the children themselves in 12-year old children of immigrants and non-immigrants and to study the level of agreement between the different informants. As a consequence we have a growing number of children born of immigrant parents and the number of children with an immigrant background continuous to rise in many countries but vary a lot from 39% in Switzerland to 17% in France [2] and in Sweden today 29.3% of all newborns [3] and 14% of adolescents in junior high school [4] are secondgeneration immigrants. This means that the wellbeing of such a large proportion of this young population is of great concern and of national interest. They pointed out several major influence factors in migrant children’s mental health, such as a low socio-economic status, a Non-European origin, an uncertain cultural identity of the parents, maternal harsh parenting or inadequate parental occupation, a minority status, the younger age, gender effects or a specific culture declaration in diseases
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