Mother's and Father's Depression and Thoughts of Death Associated with Their Child's Appraisals of Connectedness

Purpose: Parent-child connectedness is influenced by parental mood. The quality of parent-child interactions, often starting at infancy, is lower among mothers with depressive symptoms compared to mothers without depression.  Children describing their fathers as unapproachable also reported increased conflict and rejection from their fathers. This study extends past research by investigating the long-term effects of parental depression and thoughts of death on parent-child connectedness.

 

Method: The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study data (1998-2009) examined the impact of biological parental depressive symptoms (DS) and thoughts of death (TOD) on parent-child connectedness at ages 1, 3, 5, and 9. 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. Models were run separately (=4,706; =4,092), utilizing a three-step estimation with a linear regression auxiliary model (Asparouhov & Muthen, 2014). Latent class analysis identified different topologies related to parental DS and TOD from their children’s ages 1-9, and associations of parent-child connectedness at age 9. We hypothesized that children of parents with chronic or sporadic DS and TOD would report lower levels of parent-child connectedness at age 9 than children with parents without depressive symptoms and TOD.

Results: Eight-class ((184)=214.86,p>.05;BIC=20281.50,CAIC=20352.50) and four-class ((218)=272.68,p<.01;BIC=13145.65,CAIC=13180.65) models captured homogeneous class memberships for maternal and paternal depressive symptoms and TOD respectively. Regardless of parent, when comparing classes with DS/TOD to the “no mother or father DS/TOD” classes, all classes all had significantly lower parent-child connectedness reported by their nine-year-old child (Mother:  [1.20, 3.40] and Father: ). Of these comparisons, the largest class differences occurred with mother-child connectedness (mother reported both DS and TOD when child was ages 1, 3 and 9) and the “no mother or father DS/TOD” class ( = 3.40, Wald Test= 5.99, p<.001, Cohen’s D=8.88.  Among father comparisons, the largest class differences occurred with father-child connectedness (father reported DS at child’s age 5 and DS/DOT at age 9) and the “no DS/TOD” class = 2.67, Wald Test= 10.10, p<.001, Cohen’s D=5.41.  

Implications:  Our main findings indicate that poor parental mental well-being throughout a child’s early years, even when sporadic, has a significant, negative affect on the child’s perceptions of the quality of their relationships with their parents in middle childhood. Chronic depression among mothers has a stronger effect on the child’s perception of connectedness than does father’s depression. Yet father’s reported mood has a significant effect. When the child was older (i.e., 5 and 9 years of age), father’s depressive symptoms and thoughts of death had a strong impact on children compared to when they were younger (i.e., 1 and 3 years of age).  This research suggests that clinicians should monitor parental depressive symptoms early in the child’s life due to the long-term effects on the parent-child relationship.  Clinicians should also ask parents about chronic, past or depressive symptoms during the first year of their child’s life and periodically throughout latency.