Parent-child congruency on the screen for child anxiety-related emotional disorders

Abstract

Anxiety is a frequently experienced mental health issue among children and youth, particularly among children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) due to their adverse experiences in social and school settings. Child anxiety often remains unnoticed or misinterpreted, and this leads to delayed diagnosis and treatment of children’s anxiety issues. Educators and professionals also face difficulties in diagnosing the anxiety of children due to the lack of valid and reliable instruments for screening and diagnostics of children’s anxiety. This study applied the SCARED scale for children and parents, which is a proven screening instrument for the identification of children’s anxiety to examine parents’ perception and awareness of the anxiety experienced by their children diagnosed with ADHD. The scale was translated and administered to 11 to 13-year-old children and their parents. Based on responses from 65 parent-child dyads, this study found that the translated and modified scoring procedure of the SCARED scale used in this study effectively identified higher anxiety levels in children with clinically diagnosed ADHD compared to children with no such condition. This was so for both the child and the parent versions of the SCARED. The study also identified high levels of correlation between the children’s self-ratings and their parents’ ratings of these same children, but children’s self-reported scores were significantly higher than the level of anxiety perceived by their parents. Overall, the study found that the translated and modified SCARED scale could be used to screen children’s anxiety. However, a large-scale analysis is necessary to precisely confirm the metric characteristics of the SCARED scale.