Do Parents Know How Their Children Are Really Feeling?
Published: 18 March 2026
Commentary
A new study finds that parents often underestimate their children’s emotional difficulties, with the largest gaps for those children experiencing the most distress. Providing parents with information about common perception gaps can help some better understand their child’s wellbeing, highlighting the importance of supporting both children and their parents in addressing mental health.
Concern about children’s mental health is growing across many countries. Rising levels of emotional distress among young people have prompted increased attention from policymakers, schools and families. But an important question often receives less attention: how well do parents understand how their children are feeling?
Parents are among the most important investors in children’s development. Decisions about time, support and resources depend heavily on what parents believe about their child’s wellbeing. If those beliefs are inaccurate – for example if parents underestimate distress – children may not receive the support they need.
In a new study, researchers – including Professor Eugenio Proto of the Adam Smith Business School – seek to examine how accurate parents’ perceptions are of their children’s socio-emotional wellbeing, and whether those perceptions can change when parents receive new information.
A long-standing puzzle
Researchers have long observed that parents (or parental figures) and children often report different views of a child’s mental wellbeing. When children are asked about emotional difficulties – such as anxiety or sadness – their answers frequently differ from those given by parents or teachers.
Why does this difference exist? One possibility is that parents and children report emotions and experiences differently. Another is that parents or guardians simply do not observe everything their child experiences. Children’s emotions are often internal and may not always be visible, especially to adults.
Measuring parental understanding
To investigate this, the researchers distinguish between two types of parental beliefs:
- First-order beliefs: what parents think about their child’s wellbeing.
- Second-order beliefs: what parents think their child would say about their wellbeing.
If parents have access to accurate information, they should be able to predict how their child would report their own emotional state. When these second-order beliefs are inaccurate, it suggests that parents lack information about what their child is experiencing.
This distinction enables the researchers to differentiate between misperceptions caused by limited information from differences in how parents and children interpret survey questions.
Evidence from three countries
To test these effects, the researchers analyse data from the UK, Australia and Luxembourg. Across all three countries a consistent pattern emerges:
Parents tend to report fewer socio-emotional difficulties for their children than children report themselves.
The gap appears across multiple measures of emotional wellbeing. It is larger for girls than for boys.
The analysis suggests that roughly 70% of the difference between parent and child reports is explained by information frictions – that is, parents not fully observing or interpreting their child’s emotional state.
Importantly, the gap becomes larger when children report higher levels of distress. In other words, the children who may need the most support are often those whose difficulties parents are least able to observe.
The “capacity paradox”
One surprising finding concerns family circumstances.
Parents with higher education, income and employment status tend to be more aware that parents in general may underestimate children’s difficulties compared to children’s self-reports. Yet these same parents are less accurate when assessing their own child’s wellbeing.
This could be termed a “capacity paradox.” Parents with demanding jobs may understand the broader issue but have less time and attention to observe subtle signals about their own child’s emotional state.
Can information help?
If information gaps explain much of the misunderstanding, an obvious question follows: can providing information help parents update their beliefs?
To explore this, the researchers ran an information experiment with around 500 parent-child pairs in Luxembourg. Some parents were given a brief message explaining how parents’ assessments and children’s own reports of wellbeing can differ.
They then measured whether parents updated their beliefs about their child’s wellbeing.
The results show that parental beliefs can change – but not for everyone. Parents who already suspected that discrepancies might exist were more likely to revise their views. By contrast, parents who strongly believed there was no gap between parent and child reports were largely unaffected.
Implications
These findings suggest that parents may not always have complete information about their child’s emotional experiences, even when they are highly engaged.
Simple interventions – such as sharing evidence about common reporting gaps – may help some parents become more aware of potential difficulties.
As debates about children’s mental health continue, this new research highlights an important point: supporting children’s wellbeing may also require helping parents better understand what their children are experiencing.
The full paper can be downloaded on the ifo Institute website.
First published: 18 March 2026