# What Parents Say and do: Parental Responses to Asian American Young Adult Mental Health and Help Seeking

## TL;DR

This study introduces a new tool to measure how Asian American parents influence their children's views on mental health and help-seeking.

## Contribution

The study introduces the PMHS-PR scale, a new empirical measure of parental mental health socialization in Asian American families.

## Key findings

- The PMHS-PR scale has a bifactor structure with one general and five specific factors related to parental mental health socialization.
- The scale shows strong reliability and validity, linking parental responses to young adult mental health outcomes and stigma attitudes.
- Parental messages about mental health stigma and distress are significantly associated with young adult mental health and openness to help-seeking.

## Abstract

Asian American cultures may hold culturally construed views of mental health and help-seeking that are contrary to Western, biomedical notions of mental health and treatment. Asian American young adults may learn culturally specific views of mental health and help-seeking through the family, which is the primary socialization context for children. Parental mental health socialization, a central mechanism through which parents transmit messages about mental health and help-seeking to children, is designed to shape the way Asian American young adults understand and respond to distress. This study developed and tested the Parental Mental Health Socialization – Parental Responses (PMHS-PR) scale, one of the first measures of parental processes of mental health socialization among a sample of 486 Asian American young adults. Using a split sample approach, exploratory factor analysis first determined the factor structure of the measure on Sample 1 (n = 243), followed by a confirmatory factor analysis on Sample 2 (n = 243). Correlations between derived factors with measures of stigma attitudes and mental health outcomes were examined. Results revealed a bifactor structure with one general factor of parental mental health socialization and five specific factors: Parental Stigma Toward Youth, Parental Supportiveness, Enduring and Overcoming Distress, Hiding Mental Health from Others, and Parental Silence. The PMHS-PR showed good internal consistency reliability and concurrent validity with depression and somatic symptoms and stigma attitudes towards mental illness. Findings indicate that the PMHS-PR is a multidimensional, psychometrically sound scale that measures broadband and narrowband dimensions of parent mental health socialization among Asian Americans that are linked to salient young adult mental health outcomes. This signals its importance in identifying familial influences that centrally shape mental health attitudes and help-seeking among Asian American young adults.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10826-026-03259-4.

Parental mental health socialization is a key mechanism through which Asian American children learn and develop an understanding of mental health and help seeking.

The new empirical measure of parental mental health socialization captures culturally anchored parental responses to youth mental distress.

Parental messages of cultural mental health stigma, parental silence, enduring and overcoming distress and hiding distress is related to Asian American young adult mental health and stigma attitudes.

Finding highlight the crucial role of parental socialization in shaping Asian American children’s view of mental health and openness to mental health.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10826-026-03259-4.