Supporting Mental Health in Adolescents and their Parents: Using Developmental Science to Refine and Promote the Uptake of a Local Community Intervention

Stressors encountered in daily life such as family conflicts contribute to the risk of experiencing mental health issues such as anxiety. Conflicts between parents and their children increase in adolescence, but research has focused primarily on its mental health implications for adolescents and not also parents. Parents of adolescents go through their own developmental transitions (e.g., midlife) that bring significant stressors with them. Therefore, both parental and adolescent developmental status and mental health need to be understood to help families develop healthy communication and conflict skills, which may benefit the mental health of both individuals. We need to identify which types of emotion patterns are associated with increased risks, or protection from, the development of mental health issues in response to stressors. We aim to identify parent-adolescent emotion dynamics in the context of stress that are associated with both parents’ and adolescents’ anxiety. The primary impact will be to refine an existing community-based intervention for parents of anxious adolescents and to promote its accessibility by involving families and counsellors in the redevelopment process.