Grant: Team Grant: Mental Health in the Early Years Implementation Science

Untreated parent mental illness often impacts young children by exposing them to stressful events such as violence or unsupportive parent-child relationships. We have created an App-based program called BEAM (Building Emotional Awareness and Mental Well-Being) to support family mental health by providing brief educational videos, group checks-in, chat forums with other parents, and mental health symptom tracking. BEAM is a great fit for the Mental Health in the Early Years grant because it is designed to improve the well-being of a generation of children who were born during a global pandemic to highly-stressed parents. Our research so far shows great promise in helping parents overcome challenges such as anxiety, anger, depression, and sleep problems. It also reduces harsh parenting, like yelling and spanking, and improves parent-child relationships. We expect that BEAM will be able to prevent child mental health problems and developmental impairments, when rolled-out in the community. We will test this idea in a new clinical trial in which BEAM is delivered by Family Dynamics, a large community organization, linked to neighbourhood drop-in centres. We will track program roll-out and measure BEAM's success at preventing harsh parenting and improving child well-being and readiness to start school. Our partnership model will establish a strategy for wide-scale delivery of BEAM across Canada in a way that is accessible to those that need it most. We're excited to help children and families thrive in the recovery from the pandemic and beyond.