There is no question that worries a father more: Is what my son does normal? It is assumed that children have tantrums, that their ability to concentrate is limited, that sometimes when they are very young they hit or bite to express themselves, that they do not always do what they are told to do, that screens attract them… But At what point do these behaviors go from being normal to being a symptom of psychological discomfort, something that requires professional guidance and help?
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That is the question. AND it’s difficult to answer. To begin with, and although we are in a moment of great social awareness about the child and adolescent mental health crisis that is spreading, there is a lack of general open data for consultation: although it may seem incredible, there is no ‘big picture’ of the psychological state of children and young people accessible to all researchers and professionals involved.
This lack of data draws even more attention when we remember that childhood “is a key moment” for mental health. At this stage of life, the disorders that we can suffer in adulthood have not yet begun or have not become chronic, so, experts point out, “it is the ideal time” to prevent them. However, professionals working in the field of children’s mental health face this problem armed with little data. Unlike other professionals, who have data on the evolution of different health indicators over the years (such as the famous ‘percentiles’ of weight and height), in the case of mental health the lack of reliable data “makes it difficult “the detection of problems and, therefore, prevention.”
For this reason, from the University of the Balearic Islands, members of the research group in Cognitive-Affective Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology (CANCLIP) and of Behavior and Technology Laboratory (BATLAB) are creating a digital repository of psychological information of the population of the Balearic Islands between 6 and 12 years old.
As? First, they need to collect the information offered by families and to do this, to improve mental health research and promote the psychological well-being of children and young people, they have created an application: GroWinApp.
The idea of GroWinApp, explains Maria Balle, professor of Psychology and one of the promoters along with Jordi Llabrés, is to create a digital repository of data on children’s behavior that helps the scientific community in promoting mental health. Doing it through an app also overcomes the limitations of the paper form, since the app can send messages for parents to answer a specific questionnaire at a specific time, which provides researchers with more information.
Families who are encouraged to participate and fill out questionnaires about their children’s behavior have access to content related to the many questions that parenting generates: lifelong doubts (“How can I help my child if he has nightmares?”) and also those of recent times (“How can I help my child make healthy use of video games?”).
The blog is full of entries written by the project’s researchers, always based on scientific evidence, emphasizes Balle, who has been working in this line for years (his doctoral thesis dealt with the risk factors for developing anxiety in childhood and adolescence). .
That parents’ desire for information to look for answers on how to raise is not a perception: the team (completed by Alfonso Morillas, Fede Leguizamo, Patricia García, Victoria Copoví, Núria González-Bénnassar, Rebeca LeMore and Maria Àngels Ollers) has proven that it is very real with a research that has shown that websites on education and mental health are the resource most used by parents of school-age minors. They warn that, as they have been able to verify, websites with evidence-based information “are scarce”, so many families may be relying on information that is not true or proven about parenting.
Therefore, before creating the blog with the entries, the researchers carried out a study in which they verified that the most frequent concerns among parents are related to “emotional difficulties” (72% of responses) and academic performance (69%). In addition, a statistically significant relationship was observed between academic performance and age and between the use of new technologies and age.
Having proven that this search for answers exists, this UIB group, in addition to the blog, also offers as an incentive to ‘engage’ more families, talks in schools to clarify doubts, always from science, on these topics.
Later, they will make general reports for the participants and consider opening a direct consultation so that parent volunteers can send their questions to the team’s researchers.
Maria Balle reasons that these questions that arise for today’s parents are logical and that, although it is difficult to answer the question of whether it is more difficult than ever to educate children today, there are new challenges and conditions. For example, she points out, it is normal that parents currently have less time to dedicate to their children, and that is somehow noticeable.
Regarding technology, he argues that its use is positive for many things, but it is also true, he points out, that it has risks and that there are parents who are a little “lost” managing an element that was not present when they were growing up.
This project is launched at a time of great awareness about the crisis of psychological distress that many children and young people are going through (for example, cases of self-harm in minors, to name just one of the most alarming indicators, grow year after year after the pandemic). Spain is one of the European countries with the highest prevalence of mental health problems among the youngest and the data tends to be worse in low-income households, as Save the Children warned in a work it presented in 2021. In the Balearic Islands, it has been announced that schools will have psychologists starting next year.
For now, in these months that it has been GroWinAPP available 236 people The application has been downloaded (it can be done through the website: growinapp.cat/blog) and a hundred families have already answered all the questionnaires.
Have the answers of at least half a thousand families would be the objective to begin to put together that desired repository so that mental health professionals and researchers have “essential” information to improve the quality of scientific research in this field and thus contribute to preventing the appearance of these problems and promoting the emotional well-being of children and young people.