Association between problematic behaviors and individual/environmental factors in difficult children

Factors of Having Difficulties Raising 3-Year-Old Children in Japan: Usefulness of Maternal and Child Health Information Accumulated by the Local Government

Background: Difficulties raising children may be associated with depressive tendencies and abuse by parents, for which maternal and child health information may be useful. We clarified factors related to difficulties in raising children at the time of the 3-year-old child health checkup. Method: This was a retrospective cohort study. We used maternal and child health information collected from the time of pregnancy notification until the 3-year-old child health checkup. The subjects were the parents of 507 children who were born and eligible for the 3-year-old child health checkup between September 2013 and October 2017. Logistic regression and ROC analyses were performed. The dependent variable was “having difficulties raising children at the 3-year-old health checkup”. Result: Eleven factors were clarified as risk factors. Three major factors among them were having difficulties raising children at the 18-month-old checkup (adOR, 6.3; 95%CI, 3.0–13.9), actions are at the child’s own pace and adult instructions are difficult to follow at the 18-month-old health checkup (adOR, 5.0; 95%CI, 1.3–25.4), and EPDS score ≥ 2 (adOR, 3.4; 95%CI, 1.5–8.1). The AUC of this predictive model was 0.86. At a cutoff value of 0.387, the sensitivity was 79.7% and the specificity was 77.6%. Conclusion: Having difficulties raising children at the 3-year-old health checkup has factors from the time of pregnancy and requires continued support. It was possible and useful to use maternal and child health information when screening high-risk parents.

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of children in Bangladesh: A cross-sectional study

COVID-19 pandemic poses a significant mental health threat among children in Bangladesh. This study aims to explore the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of children during the lockdown in Bangladesh. An online cross-sectional study was conducted from 25th April to 9th May 2020 among 384 parents having at least one child aged between 5-15 years using non-probability sampling. K-means clustering used to group children according to mental health score and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) performed to identify the relationship among the parental behavior and child mental health, and also these associations were assessed through chi-square test. Children were classified into four groups where 43% of child had subthreshold mental disturbances (mean Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)-10; 2.8), 30.5% had mild (mean MDD-10; 8.9), 19.3% suffered moderately (mean MDD-10; 15.9), and 7.2% of child suffered from severe disturbances (mean MDD-10; 25.2). The higher percentage of mental health disturbances of children with the higher education level of parents, relative infected by COVID-19 (yes), parents still need to go the workplace (yes), and parent's abnormal behavior but lower to their counterparts. This paper demonstrates large proportions of children are suffering from mental health disturbances in Bangladesh during the period of lockdown. Implementation of psychological intervention strategies and improvement in house-hold financial conditions, literacy of parents, taking care of children, and job security may help in improving the psychological/mental status of children and the authors believe that the findings will be beneficial to accelerate the rate of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) linked to health status in Bangladesh.