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Background: Screen time among children and adolescents has increased dramatically, raising concerns about its impact on development and mental health. While research highlights both potential benefits and risks, excessive use has been linked to issues like anxiety, depression, and gaming addiction. Despite growing concern, effective interventions are scarce. Recognizing the importance of family dynamics in child development, we propose a family-centered program to address problematic gaming and excessive screen use in a clinical population. By involving both children and parents, we aim to create a more comprehensive approach to prevention and treatment., Objective: This study aims to determine the possibility of distributing and evaluating a family-centered group program for problematic gaming and excessive screen use (FAME) in a clinical child and adolescent psychiatry (CAP) population. We will monitor the recruitment rate; track the retention and attendance rates of both parents and children; and assess whether each session's objectives are met, the content is delivered within the allotted time, and the necessary resources (eg, facilitators and materials) are available. Additionally, we will gather qualitative and quantitative feedback from participants through postprogram surveys and individual interviews with both children and parents., Methods: A total of 10 families with ongoing contact with CAP in Skåne, Sweden, will be recruited and offered participation in a family-centered group program targeting children aged 10-18 years with reported difficulties regarding screen gaming or screen use. The intervention to be tested is a newly developed, family-centered, psychoeducational, cognitive behavioral therapy-based intervention addressing both positive and negative aspects of screen use; setting boundaries; the connection between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; conflict triggers; and sleep hygiene. The primary goal of the pilot study is to test the feasibility of the program, as well as recruitment and the analysis of participants' experiences with the program., Results: A total of 11 children and their parents were enrolled during first quarter of 2024. A 4-session pilot was delivered in first quarter of 2024, and the first results are expected in the third quarter of 2024., Conclusions: The overarching goal of this pilot study is to determine the possibility of distributing and evaluating a family-centered group program for problematic gaming and excessive screen use (FAME) in a clinical CAP population. The insights gained from this study will guide our future research, which will focus on conducting a larger-scale evaluation of the intervention's impact on family screen time conflicts and inform future strategies for the implementation of family-centered interventions in child and youth clinics., Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06098807; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06098807., International Registered Report Identifier (irrid): DERR1-10.2196/56387., (©Marie Werner, Sabina Kapetanovic, Emma Claesdotter-Knutsson. Originally published in JMIR Research Protocols (https://www.researchprotocols.org), 08.10.2024.)

Background: Sustaining multiple concussions over one's lifetime may be associated with behavioral and mood changes beyond the acute phase of injury. The present cross-sectional study examined the relationship between concussion history, the incidence of current moderate-severe psychological distress, and lifetime adolescent hazardous gambling in high school students., Methods: Four-hundred fifty-nine high school students from southern Sweden (age: 16.81 ± 0.83, 58.2% male) completed a survey assessing concussion history (0,1,2…>8), psychological distress using the Kessler-6 scale, and lifetime hazardous gambling using the NODS-CLiP scale., Results: Participants who self-reported three or more concussions were more likely to endorse moderate-severe symptoms of psychological distress than those with no concussion history while controlling for covariates, OR = 2.71, 95% CI [1.19, 6.18]. In contrast, concussion history was not associated with hazardous gambling after controlling for confounding variables., Conclusions: Self-reporting three or more concussions was associated with increased current psychological distress beyond the acute phase of injury among high school students. Adolescents who have sustained multiple concussions should undergo mental health evaluations beyond the acute phase of injury to identify and treat psychological distress, but probing for hazardous gambling may not be clinically relevant in this previously concussed adolescent population., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Internalizing and externalizing problems increase during adolescence. However, these problems may be mitigated by adequate parenting, including effective parent-adolescent communication. The ways in which parent-driven (i.e., parent behavior control and solicitation) and adolescent-driven (i.e., disclosure and secrecy) communication efforts are linked to adolescent psychological problems universally and cross-culturally is a question that needs more empirical investigation. The current study used a sample of 1087 adolescents (M = 13.19 years, SD = 0.90, 50% girls) from 12 cultural groups in nine countries including China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States to test the cultural moderation of links between parent solicitation, parent behavior control, adolescent disclosure, and adolescent secrecy with adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems. The results indicate that adolescent-driven communication, and secrecy in particular, is intertwined with adolescents' externalizing problems across all cultures, and intertwined with internalizing problems in specific cultural contexts. Moreover, parent-driven communication efforts were predicted by adolescent disclosure in all cultures. Overall, the findings suggest that adolescent-driven communication efforts, and adolescent secrecy in particular, are important predictors of adolescent psychological problems as well as facilitators of parent-adolescent communication.

Using longitudinal Swedish data from 1,373 early-adolescent youths, this study aims to answer the question of whether the previously established protective function of parental knowledge and its sources-adolescent disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental control-on substance use among early-adolescents is moderated by the adolescent's temperament. Adolescent temperament moderated several links between parental knowledge and its sources and adolescent substance use. The most pronounced moderating results were found for those adolescents with fearless, socially detached and thrill-seeking tendencies. For these "detached thrill-seekers", bidirectional links between adolescent disclosure and substance use, and negative links between parental solicitation and substance use were found. We recommend, therefore, that adolescent temperament is considered when designing parenting programs., (© 2019 Society for Research on Adolescence.)

Parents' actions and knowledge of adolescents' whereabouts play key roles in preventing risk behaviors in early adolescence, but what enables parents to know about their adolescents' activities and what links there are to adolescent risk behaviors, such as substance use and delinquent behavior, remain unclear. In this study, we investigated whether different aspects of the parent-adolescent relationship predict parental knowledge, and we examined the direct and indirect longitudinal associations between these aspects of the parent-adolescent relationship and adolescents' self-reported delinquent behavior and substance use. The participants were 550 parents and their adolescent children from two small and two midsized municipalities in Sweden. Parental data were collected when the adolescents were 13 years old (mean), and adolescent data on risk behaviors were collected on two occasions, when they were 13 and 14 years of age (mean). Structural path analyses revealed that adolescent disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental control predicted parental knowledge, with adolescent disclosure being the strongest source of parental knowledge and the strongest negative predictor of adolescent risk behaviors. Parenting competence and adolescents' connectedness to parents were indirectly, through adolescent disclosure and parental solicitation and parental control, associated with substance use and delinquent behavior. Some paths differed for boys and girls. In conclusion, confident parenting and a close parent-adolescent relationship in which adolescent disclosure is promoted, seem protective of adolescent engagement in risk behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).