Guest blog post written by Hee Yun Lee, PhD & Raiza Beltran, MPH,  School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, in partnership with the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare.

According to the U.S. Census, from 1990 to 2013, the U.S. immigrant population doubled to 4.3 million, comprising thirteen percent of the total U.S. population. With this unprecedented growth, the population of children with immigrant parents or who are immigrants themselves also increased within the same decades. Today, approximately one of out of four children in the U.S. lives in immigrant households. Despite a lack of reliable data on the number of immigrants currently in the child welfare system, experts acknowledge that child welfare workers may see an increase in the number of immigrant children, or children with immigrant parents, needing their services.

However, immigrant families face multiple challenges that may reduce their ability to work well with child welfare workers. Among these potential barriers are low health literacy and low mental health literacy. Health literacy is defined as the “Degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions,” while mental health literacy is the “knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management or prevention.” Immigrants, particularly those with limited English proficiency skills, were found to have low health literacy and certain immigrants, Asian Americans in particular, were found to have low mental health literacy. Previous research also points to a relationship between poor parental health literacy and poor child health outcomes. Therefore, it is imperative that child welfare workers are aware of health and mental health literacy, especially when working with immigrant families. Child welfare workers can empower clients identified with low health literacy by linking them to services that can improve their functional health literacy, communicative/interactive health literacy, and critical health literacy.

For more information and resources on health literacy in Asian Immigrant families, check out our fact sheet.

Also, keep an eye out over the next week for our social media campaign, which includes daily Twitter and Facebook posts about this topic.

 

 

Resource List

  • Jimenez, M. E., Barg, F. K., Guevara, J. P., Gerdes, M., & Fiks, A. G. (2013). The impact of parental health literacy on the early intervention referral process. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 24(3), 1053–1062. doi:10.1353/hpu.2013.0141
  • Johnson, M. A. (2007). The social ecology of acculturation: Implications for child welfare services to children of immigrants. Children and Youth Services Review, 29(11), 1426–1438. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2007.06.002
  • Jorm, A. F. (2012). Mental health literacy: empowering the community to take action for better mental health. The American Psychologist, 67(3), 231–43. doi:10.1037/a0025957
  • Kutner, M., Greenberg, E., Jin, Y., & Paulsen, C. (2006). The Health Literacy of America’s Adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NCES 2006–483), U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics.
  • Lee, H. Y., Lytle, K., Yang, P. N., & Lum, T. (2010). Mental health literacy in Hmong and Cambodian elderly refugees: a barrier to understanding, recognizing, and responding to depression. International Journal of Aging & Human Development, 71(4), 323–344. doi:10.2190/AG.71.4.d
  • Porr, C., Drummond, J., & Richter, S. (2006). Health Literacy as an Empowerment Tool for Low-Income Mothers. Family & Community Health, 29(4), 328–335. doi:10.1097/00003727-200610000-00011
  • Rajendran, K., & Chemtob, C. M. (2010). Factors associated with service use among immigrants in the child welfare system. Evaluation and Program Planning, 33(3), 317–323. doi:10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2009.06.017
  • Ratzan, S. C. & Parker, R. M. (2000). Introduction. In C. R. Selden, M. Zorn, R. M. Ratzan (Eds.), National library of medicine current bibliographies in medicine: Health Literacy (pp. v-vi). NLM Pub. No. CBM 2000-1. Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
  • Yin, H. S., Dreyer, B. P., Vivar, K. L., MacFarland, S., Van Schaick, L., & Mendelsohn, A. L. (2012). Perceived barriers to care and attitudes towards shared decision-making among low socioeconomic status parents: Role of health literacy. Academic Pediatrics, 12(2), 117–124. doi:10.1016/j.acap.2012.01.001