Child Behavior May Predict How Depressed Moms Punish Bad Manners

Maternal depression may predict child behavior, a new study suggests.

New research reveals that a mother's depressive symptoms may influence her children's behavior.

Many mothers suffer depression, and previous studies show that maternal depression can lead to worse developmental outcomes for children.

The latest study, which involved 319 mothers and their children over a two-year period, suggests that parenting skills seem to deteriorate when symptoms of depression increase.

"Children can often be demanding, needy, unpredictable, uncooperative, and highly active," lead research Theodore Dix of the University of Texas at Austin said in a news release. "The task of parenting, particularly with children who are emotionally reactive, is especially difficult for mothers experiencing symptoms of depression because they are continually attempting to regulate their distress and discomfort."

Researchers hypothesized that depressed mothers are more likely to respond to their children in different ways, depending on the child and the situation. However, researchers linked all maternal responses to the same underlying process.

"Attempting to minimize immediate distress or discomfort may sometimes prompt mothers to avoid conflict with their children, leading to unresponsive and lax parenting," said Dix. "At other times, it may lead them to accelerate that conflict to address their child's aversive behavior, leading to over-reactive parenting."

The two-year study revealed that mothers became less responsive as their depression increased. However, this was only true when their children's behavior wasn't overly unpleasant. However, mothers' depression symptoms were particularly unpleasant when children were naughty.

"Given links between lax and over-reactive discipline to child abuse, coercive family process, and developmental problems in children, understanding basic mechanisms that promote these problematic forms of parenting is important," Dix concluded.

The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.