Nearly a quarter of parents in the United States say at least one of their children is not receiving the mental health care they need, according to Harvard researchers, exposing critical gaps to access around the country.
At least one child needed mental health care in one in five of the 173,000 households included in the new survey.
“Among these parents, 24.8% reported an unmet need, 16.6% reported difficulty in accessing care and 21.8% cited such difficulty as the reason their children did not receive care,” the researchers said in a study analysing the 2023-2024 data.
The burden was disproportionately felt in households with homeschooled children. More than 30 percent of children in those homes had an unmet need for care.
“Our analysis provides timely evidence that, despite the increasing awareness of youth mental health needs, access to necessary mental health care remains a challenge for a large number of U.S. households,” Hao Yu, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement.
Source: The Independent, 16 February 2026
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