Measuring and decomposing income inequalities in child and adolescent mental health in the UK

Journal article

Abstract:: Children from low-income families experience worse mental health than their wealthier peers. In this study, we quantified income inequalities in child mental health from early childhood to adolescence and identified key contributing factors explaining observed inequalities. Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, we followed 5,667 children aged 3 to 17. We analysed overall mental health problems and their internalising and externalising domains, assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. We applied a concentration index approach to quantify these inequalities, incorporating both relative and absolute inequality measures. We then decomposed the concentration index to analyse the contribution of various risk factors at different ages. We found inequalities across all mental health domains at every age, with poor mental health concentrated among children from low-income families, and an increasing inequality in internalising problems over time. The decomposition analysis showed that maternal depression and child-parent relationships were key contributors to these inequalities. These findings highlight the importance of addressing income inequalities in child mental health. Reducing inequalities in maternal depression and child-parent relationships may help reduce the mental health gap between children from lowand high-income families.

Files:: Yang_et_al_2026_Measuring_and_decomposing.pdf

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Language:: English
Keywords:: child mental health

income inequality

health inequality

decomposition of concentration index
Pubs id:: 2395353
Local pid:: pubs:2395353
Deposit date:: 2026-03-26
ARK identifier:: ark:/29072/ora_2c2df2076ee94f47812b48ac99d1886c

Copyright holder:: Yang et al.
Rights statement:: Copyright © 2026, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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