Parental Depressive Symptoms in Latino Families and Impact on Parent-Child Connectedness

Purpose: Parent-child connectedness is influenced by parental mental well-being. Mothers with depressive symptoms reported poor quality interactions with their children. Similarly, fathers who were rated as unapproachable by their children described their relationships as conflicting and hostile. Although we know mental health patterns vary by ethnicity, one area that has been unexplored is how ethnicity may affect the relationship between depression and parent-child connectedness.

Method: Using data from the 1998-2009 Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we examined the impact of the biological parents’ depressive symptoms (DS) on parent-child connectedness of children at ages 1, 3, 5, and 9 in Latino families compared to non-Latino families. Parent child connectedness was an average of six questions based on a Likert scale 1(not very close)-4 (extremely close) measuring closeness and time spent with the parents answered by the child. Multiple-group latent class analysis compared typologies of longitudinal DS separately for Latino and non-Latino parents. Parental long-term depressive patterns predicted parent-child connectedness based on data from child interviews at age 9 using a manual three-step estimation with linear regression auxiliary models. This methodology also allowed us to determine the effects of concurrent mother-father DS. 

Results: Depressive symptoms were evident among almost half (46%) of Latino parents compared to roughly 23% of non-Latino parents. Four-class ((215)=238.32,p>.05;BIC=7528.95,CAIC=7563.95) and six-class ((199)=297.16, p<.01;BIC=14725.35,CAIC=14778.34) models captured the homogeneity of groups related to chronic DS for Latino and non-Latino parents respectively, suggesting differences in DS among these groups. When comparing Latino families with DS to Latino parents without DS, all DS classes had lower levels of parent-child connectedness. The most significant class difference was found among mothers who reported depression when their child was 3 and 9 years old (=-1.71,Wald Test=-2.73,p<.01; Cohen’s D=5.89(large effect size)). When comparing 5 classes of non-Latino parents reporting DS to the class of parents without any reported DS longitudinally, parents with DS, whether chronic or sporadic, all had lower levels of parent-children connectedness (ranging from 2.00 (Class 1: maternal chronic depression in all four waves but no paternal depression; Wald Test= -8.40, p<.001) to 3.71). The most significant class difference was found in Class 4 of non-Latino parents that included mothers with DS when their child was ages 1 and 5 and also when their father simultaneously reported DS at child’s age 5 (Wald Test= -3.47, p<.001, Cohen’s D=13.67(large effect size).,

Conclusion:

This study adds to the literature in two significant ways. Although the rates of Latino parental depression are twice as high as that of non-Latinos, we found that DS is associated with parent-child connectedness longitudinally irrespective of ethnicity. Furthermore, we found that concurrent mother-father depression decreased parent-child connectedness among non-Latino, but not Latino parents. In addition to the level of connectedness, further research is needed for a deeper understanding about cultural differences in the quality of parent-child connectedness in the presence of parental depression.  Analyses of the long-lasting effects of parent’s depressive symptoms on parent-child connectedness can inform the practice of social workers but also those in related fields.