Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library: Child & Adolescent Development: Open Access Resources
the above is a curated collection of open access (free to read) resources related to child and teen development. the page has tabs for books, academic journals, online courses, and websites. Journals would be a good place to find studies and research; books and websites are more likely to have essay-style writing (though could include studies as well).
some specific resources that seem potentially useful to your desired topics (some from the above website, some from my own browsing):
Child Development, published by Wiley until early 2026. you can browse the article archive, or search within the journal for desired topics. note that the journal is only partially open access, so there are some articles you can read for free, while others are paywalled. if you do a topic search, make sure the search bar dropdown says "this journal" and not "anywhere," unless you want it to do a search of all of Wiley's journals (it defaults back to "anywhere" after your first search, which I find annoying, but thankfully it's not hard to switch back)
Early Childhood Development and Care, published by Taylor and Francis. another partial open access journal, but you can check a box in the filters sidebar to only display open-access articles.
Early Childhood Research and Practice, published from 1999 to 2015. material might be slightly more dated, but it looks like the articles should all be available to view through the archive. it's also a multilingual journal, with many articles cross-published in Spanish and/or Chinese, which I think is pretty neat.
JCPP Advances, also published by Wiley (same caution applies to make sure you know whether you're searching that specific journal or the whole database). appears to be fully open access. it also looks like they published a special issue focused on centering child and teen voices in mental health research, which seems aligned with the types of resources you're looking for.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a phenomenal resource for locating free-to-read journals on pretty much any topic you can think of. I tried searching "child psychology" and "developmental psychology," which is how I found a couple of the resources listed above. there are journals indexed from all over the world and in many different languages, all either partially or fully open access.
Child Abuse Library Online, which is provided by the National Children's Advocacy Center as a collection of resources for professionals working with children who have experienced abuse or maltreatment. the full collection is only available to members, but the default search page allows you to search their open-access resources.
Social Psychology Network's page on developmental psychology is one big collection of links to other resources, so it could provide another jumping-off point as you search.
how you search will depend on what specifically you're looking for, but for a broad starting point, I recommend doing a combined search for mental health and children/teenagers. most of the above resources will accept Boolean operators, so you could set up a search looking something like this (just typed directly into the search bar):
"mental health" AND child* OR teen* OR adolescen*
putting "mental health" in quotes means that those words are returned specifically when they appear next to each other. the asterisks are a way of saying "find words that start like this, but could end any number of ways" -- e.g., child* would return results for child, children, childhood, etc.
the AND operator means that results should include both "mental health" and the search term(s) that come afterward. connecting child*, teen*, and adolescen* with OR means that any one of those would return results, regardless of which specific word(s) the author decided to use to describe young humans.
disclaimer that because I am researching in the U.S., there is likely at least some representative bias toward U.S.-specific resources? of the resources listed above, DOAJ in particular is good for finding non-U.S. publications as well as publications in languages other than English.
