Parental Awareness of Children’s Psychosocial Needs: Parents’ and Childcare Professionals’ Perspectives

Despite high rates of child mental health needs globally, these remain largely unmet. Barriers to the provision of psychosocial support to children include stigma and sparse resources. To address this gap, local professionals can promote change by working to capacitate parents on children’s mental health needs. In the current study, five childcare professionals (also referred to as “trainers”) attended a Train-of-Trainer (ToT) child mental health programme before facilitating three awareness workshops for 48 parents. Of those, 16 parents and the five trainers participated in focus groups before and after the workshops to discuss factors that either enabled or hindered psychosocial awareness. Established themes emerged that were related to the concepts of psychosocial needs, parental influences, help-seeking and knowledge generation. The findings suggest that a psychosocial model with social workers at the centre can maximise existing resources, with parents playing an important peer support and education role in mobilising communities.