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Psychiatric assessments of children and adolescents commonly incorporate reports from both youth and their caregivers. However, they may identify substantially different mental health problems, potentially influencing diagnosis, treatment planning and estimates of psychiatric disorder prevalence.

A new study by researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and their colleagues examined the extent to which youth and caregiver reports differed across a broad range of psychiatric diagnoses from late childhood through middle adolescence. Previous studies have focused on a limited number of disorders, like depression or anxiety, at single points in time. The study was published on Nov. 11, 2026, in JAMA Psychiatry.

The study measured how often youth and caregivers agree or disagree on psychiatric diagnoses and clinical problems, and how that agreement varies by diagnosis and developmental stage.

The research analyzed reports from 11,868 youth and their caregivers from age 9 to age 17 as part of the UC San Diego-coordinated Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, the largest long-term study of children's brain and behavioral development in the country.

Youth and their caregivers were asked the same diagnostic questions during separate clinical interviews. The researchers derived a mental health diagnosis based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) from each youth's own report and each caregiver's report. They then compared those reports and tracked how much they overlapped for each diagnosis across different developmental stages.

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