Supporting Mental Health Caregivers, Particularly Parents

Kids' Mental Health in the Postpandemic World

There are steps you can take to ensure workers and their families are healthy and resilient. The first step is to have an appreciation of what mental health challenges that youth in the United States are up against so it's easier to relate to employees who are parents.

Federal data indicates that in the 10 years leading up to the pandemic, young people in the United States experienced a 40 percent increase in feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness, as well as thoughts of suicide. ² The pandemic exacerbated this trend, so that now, postpandemic, the crisis of mental health among youth remains a concern.

"We're seeing really high rates of suicide and depression, and this has been going on for a while," said psychologist Kimberly Hoagwood, PhD, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine. "It certainly got worse during the pandemic."

Source: Zara Abrams, "Kids' Mental Health Is in Crisis. Here's What Psychologists Are Doing To Help," American Psychological Association, January 1, 2023.

Of particular note is mental healthcare around adolescents who experience gender dysphoria. The controversies around this rising phenomenon notwithstanding, the anxiety and depression this cohort of youth experiences is real and potentially lethal.

A recent prospective study of 104 transgender and nonbinary teens found that when they were given appropriate mental health support, their odds of reporting moderate to severe depression were 60 percent lower than those who did not receive support. For suicidality, the odds were 73 percent lower in those who received care compared with those who did not. ³ However, more than half of nearly 29,000 respondents to a survey of LGBTQ+ youths in the United States reported they could not access the mental healthcare they wanted. ⁴

Creating a Support Plan

Employees who are parents naturally have concerns for their children's mental health. A perceived lack of support in your workforce could result in high attrition rates. Lyra Health's study found that over half (54 percent) of US employees supporting a child with mental health challenges reported they were actively seeking a new employer over the next year, compared with 42 percent of workers not supporting a child with mental health concerns.

85 percent of the 250 HR and benefits managers surveyed claimed their organization's mental health benefits would help any employee's child with a mental health condition, while only 57 percent of the same workers surveyed agreed with that claim.

Source: 2024 State of Workforce Mental Health Report, Lyra Health, Inc., March 12, 2024.

This differential demonstrates how, despite there being great strides made in ending the stigma around child and family mental health challenges, employers still have room to improve. The importance of doing so comes down to the bottom line. The Lyra survey found that 1-in-3 employees with children who had mental health concerns reported that their own mental health suffered either "significantly" or "severely" as a result of their child's own suffering. This had a direct impact on their ability to perform their tasks at work at a rate more than double that of workers not supporting a child with a mental health condition.

Meeting Employees Where They Are

In a previous column, "Three Ways Employers Can Stop Worker Suicide," I discussed how taking an upstream, midstream, and downstream approach to mental wellness empowers all stakeholders by meeting them where they are. Upstream measures address culture changes and job strain reduction, midstream ones address early identification of emerging problems, and downstream ones address crisis response. An upstream approach to helping parents in your organization who have children with mental health concerns is to create an employee resource group.

These are affinity groups that can support and validate one another's experiences, which is a critical part of helping workers not feel isolated in their struggles. By encouraging this cohort of workers with children in mental health crises to meet regularly in the workplace and exchange ideas, you can help facilitate bonds of community and resilience while empowering them to develop their own pool of resources to supplement existing benefits.

A midstream approach would be to investigate if your work environment is creating additional, unnecessary stress on your employees with children. For example, would being more flexible with work hours be permissible and not interfere with deliverables? This could mean the difference between a parent being able to schedule and attend appointments for their child to help them get the care they need.

A downstream approach would be to have a well-delineated protocol on what accommodations may be needed for families that have lost a loved one to suicide or overdose.

Conclusion

You can't anticipate every concern your employees have, but employers who think inclusively about their workers' families can find it improves worker resilience, job satisfaction, and performance while potentially keeping attrition rates low.