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This chapter is a casebook of specific examples, drawn largely from interviews conducted with community researchers studying different aspects of children's health. The cases are intended to serve as a reference guide for those wanting to conduct collaborative community research.

This chapter examines the consequences of global transformations for children's health. It presents Pham Dieu Hien's childhood in Vietnam. His story is among the many which tell of the indelible ways that working conditions and social supports determined whether families could meet children's preventive, curative, and care needs while working. Time after time, children are placed at risk because parents have little or no choice: grossly inadequate working conditions do not permit parents to tend properly to their children's needs. When parents cannot take leave from work without losing their jobs, often no one is available to bring a child to a clinic or a hospital. When workplaces threaten the poor with an unaffordable loss of income if they change their schedule or miss work, sick children are often left home alone and unable to administer prescribed treatments or otherwise care for themselves.

This chapter begins with a brief description of the purpose of this book, which is to make explicit the implicit frameworks of researchers, community practitioners, parents or caregivers, and family advisors about models for creating sustained partnerships to improve knowledge about mental health services for children, adolescents, and their families. It then discusses the principles of collaboration, the science-to-practice gap, family/professional collaboration in child mental health services, and community-based services. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter focuses on two aspects of the debate on the role of women in growth and development: the impact of lack of access to infrastructure on women's time allocation and the role of inter- and intragenerational health externalities—namely, how mothers' time allocation decisions affect their children's health, and how health in childhood affects health in adulthood. To do so, a gender dimension is added to the analytical framework presented in the previous chapters. The chapter begins with a review of the recent evidence on women's time allocation, with a particular focus on the implications of poor access to infrastructure services, and on intergenerational health externalities. The model is then presented and its properties analyzed. The impact of public policy is considered next, and the implications of the analysis for the debate on the relationship between women's labor supply and the level of development are discussed. The concluding section considers various extensions.

This chapter describes some ways that families who care for children with mental, emotional, or behavioral problems; youth who are served by the children's mental health system; and researchers, have collaborated in research and evaluation. Topics covered include historical development of consumer involvement in mental health research; a system of care evaluation in Clark County, Washington; family involvement in systems of care, the youth-driven research project, and evaluator perspectives on collaboration with family members.

This chapter outlines key principles of collaboration that can guide efforts to involve consumers, family members, providers, administrators, and community members more fully in child mental health services research efforts. It then highlights opportunities for collaboration across the research process, from the development of guiding research questions, to study methods and procedures, to interpretation of study results and dissemination activities. Examples of the challenges that arise in collaborative efforts with youth and their families, providers, systems, and communities are discussed. Finally, a discussion of next steps for child mental health services research is offered.

This chapter weaves together reflections on two journeys, one quite public and the other more private. The public journey is the evolution of services for children with serious mental health problems in America over the past century and how the experience of one state — Connecticut — provides a more in-depth look at what has and has not occurred. The private journey is the evolution of the author's own thinking about children's mental health service systems, informed by her education as a clinical and community psychologist, her training in the world of public policy, her experience working in leadership positions in federal, state, and local settings over the past 20 years, and her most recent work in Connecticut. The chapter explores how these journeys have intertwined and what might be learned from each.

This chapter advances the development of successful partnerships between practitioners and researchers by (1) identifying the need for a two-way exchange of knowledge between practice and research; (2) highlighting the value of researcher-practitioner partnerships; (3) presenting an illustrative case study of one agency's successful work in this area; and (4) making recommendations for change.

This chapter reflects on how principles of collaboration can enliven, deepen, and validate scientific knowledge about children's mental health. In so doing, these principles also point to a future research agenda that links models of collaboration to the ethical endpoint of enhancing both the validity and usefulness of knowledge.

Child work is a continuum, and there is no clear demarcation of when work moves from a positive experience to a harmful one. In spite of the risks posed by many forms of work, for large numbers of children, the alternative to work may be hunger or other adverse outcomes. This chapter describes the health effects of children's work and the impact of this work on the communities in which they live. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, it examines the difficulties in determining the impact of child labour on health. Second, it describes approaches which can help in understanding the impact of child labour. Third, it presents examples of the impact of child labour on the health of children, families, and communities and how these impacts might be more effectively measured.

Children are exquisitely vulnerable to health threats in the environment. The World Health Organization estimates that 36% of all deaths in children worldwide are caused by harmful environmental exposures. Environmental exposures are major causes of non-communicable diseases in children—asthma, birth defects, preterm birth, neurodevlopemental disorders, cancer, obesity, and diabetes. This chapter reviews the historical origins of children’s environmental health, which is the branch of pediatric medicine and public health that studies the influence of the environment on children’s health, development, and risk of disease. It describes the evolution of research in this growing field. It describes the global spread of environmental hazards, especially toxic chemicals and pesticides to rapidly industrializing low- and middle-income countries where these materials have resulted in major episodes of disease and death in children. The chapter concludes with a discussion of strategies for prevention of environmental disease in children.

This chapter examines the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) for evidence on a number of alternate pathways for parents' health to influence children's health and development, assessing the contribution of parents' psychosocial and health-related behavioural factors to children's outcomes. It considers four possible pathways for parental health to influence child health and development: 1) parental health-related behaviours which affect both parents' and children's health; 2) the ‘psychosocial pathway’; 3) the socioeconomic background playing a role in explaining both parents' mental and physical health; 4) the psychosocial environment or behaviours.

This chapter challenges the prevailing narrative that mothers are risky to their children’s health, discussing the myriad ways in which mothers are portrayed as dangerous to their children’s health—and are often held legally responsible for it. This often occurs simultaneously with society’s failure to acknowledge the significant contributions to children’s health made by fathers and other men, as well as more distant, but equally significant, social, economic, and physical factors. The chapter introduces the role of unconscious psychological processes in influencing the decisions of key legal players.

This chapter explores theoretical work and research on mothers' mental health and its impact on children. It examines the ways in which the mental health needs of mothers are conceptualised within health and social care. Mothering is simultaneously identified as a prime site of origin for women's mental health problems and a key determinant of children's mental health. While the successful exercise of parenting skills and the intimate relationships that mothers experience with their children can be a source of satisfaction and pride, in the context of mothers with mental health needs, research has tended to focus on adverse outcomes. Positive outcomes for parents with mental health problems and their children are rarely noted.