Childhood Emotional Abuse and Youth Depressive Symptoms: The Role of Multilevel Ecological Protective Factors

Background and Purpose

Child maltreatment is a well-established risk factor for poor mental health. Among maltreatment subtypes, emotional abuse is especially salient in predicting youth depressive symptoms. However, not all youth exposed to emotional abuse experience poor outcomes—many demonstrate resilience. While prior research has identified protective factors (PFs) for depressive symptoms, few studies have simultaneously tested multiple PFs across family, school, and neighborhood contexts. Guided by resilience theory and the ecological-transactional framework, this study examined two research questions: (1) How is emotional abuse related to youth depressive symptoms? (2) To what extent do PFs across the social ecology attenuate the association between emotional abuse and adolescent depressive symptoms?

Methods

Data were from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal birth cohort of 4,898 children born in the U.S. The analytic sample included 3,023 youth with complete data. Youth depressive symptoms were measured at age 15 using CESD. Emotional abuse was assessed at child ages 3, 5, and 9 using CTS-PC. PFs measured at age 15 included parent-child relationships, school climate, peer relationships, and neighborhood social cohesion. Hierarchical Ordinary Least Squares regression was used to examine predictors of depressive symptoms. Emotional abuse was entered in Step 1, followed by sociodemographic covariates (child sex, race, parental economic hardship, marital status, education) in Step 2. Step 3 added the family-level PF (parent-child relationship), Step 4 included school-level PFs (school climate, peer relationships), and Step 5 added the neighborhood-level PF (social cohesion).

Results

There was a significant positive association between emotional abuse and depressive symptoms at the bivariate level (B = 0.35, p = .005; R² = .003), and after controlling for socio-demographic covariates (B = 0.40, p = .001; R² = .034). Adding parent-child relationship in Model 3 reduced the effect of emotional abuse on depressive symptoms by 25% (B = 0.30, p = .012; R² = .099). In Model 4, the addition of school climate further reduced the effect (B = 0.24, p = .044; R² = .133), while peer relationships remained nonsignificant. In the fully adjusted model (Model 5), emotional abuse was no longer a significant predictor of depressive symptoms (B = 0.21, p = .111; R² = .144). Parent-child relationship (B = -0.42, p < .001), school climate (B = -0.95, p < .001), and social cohesion (B = -0.12, p < .001) were all significantly associated with fewer depressive symptoms.

Conclusion and Implications

Our findings showed that emotional abuse was no longer significantly related to youth depressive symptoms after accounting for the additive effects of PFs across family, school, and neighborhood contexts. These findings reinforce the importance of multi-level, strengths-based approaches in social work practice and policy to support youth well-being. Specifically, our findings suggest that practitioners working with youth experiencing depressive symptoms and a history of emotional abuse should consider offering trauma-informed interventions aimed at strengthening parent-child relationships, improving school experience, and enhancing social cohesion. Leveraging PFs across ecological systems may offer a transformative approach to addressing the mental health consequences of emotional abuse.