Theses and Dissertations

This thesis first examines the history and contemporary landscape of school mental health, offering evidence for schools as an essential component of the child and adolescent system of care. It then provides contemporary discussion around the importance of design in public administration, as well as analyzes the current design model of school-based mental health services, including key actors, normative assumptions, and underlying conceptual models to demonstrate the outdated presumptions that have led to a model that is not designed to adapt to the unique needs of students, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on contemporary theory of design in public administration, I argue that the largely fragmented, decentralized, bureaucratic, complex, and underdeveloped design of school-based mental health services mainly developed in the 1970s and 1980s has reached its limits and cannot adapt to new societal variables. Lastly, I discuss said limitations of this model to argue for a conceptual and practical re-design of the current system of school-based mental health systems in the United States.

Prior research has established a relation between parenting behaviors and symptoms of child psychopathology, and this association may be influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Gene-environment correlation, or the influence of a child’s genes on the environment they receive, represents one possible mechanism through which genes and environment combine to influence child outcomes. This study examined evocative gene-environment correlation in the relation between parenting and symptoms of child psychopathology in a sample of 676 twins (51.5% female, 58.5% Caucasian, 23.7% Hispanic/Latinx, primarily middle class, MAge=8.43, SD=.62) recruited from Arizona birth records. Using univariate ACE twin biometric models, genetic influences were found to moderately contribute to internalizing symptoms (A=.47, C=.25, E=.28), while externalizing (A=.86, E=.14) and ADHD (A=.84, E=.16) symptoms were found to be highly heritable. The genetic influences for positive (C=.54, E=.46) and negative (C=.44, E=.56) parenting were smaller and found to be nonsignificant. The correlations between parenting and types of psychopathology were examined and bivariate Cholesky decompositions were conducted for statistically significant correlations. Negative parenting was moderately positively correlated with externalizing and ADHD symptoms; the relation between externalizing symptoms and negative parenting was found to be due to shared genetics, whereas the relation between negative parenting and ADHD symptoms was due to the shared environment. The mixed results regarding the role of gene environment correlation in relations between parenting and child psychopathology indicate that further research on the mechanisms of this relation is needed.