Child Depression During COVID-19 Pandemic Associated With Subsequent Maternal Depression
According to study results published in JAMA Pediatrics, child depression at ages 10 and 11 years during the COVID-19 pandemic was significantly associated with later maternal depression. Meanwhile, maternal depression was not associated with subsequent child depression.
“Most research to date on parent-child depression transmission has focused on, and assumed, a unidirectional association from parent to child depression, with little consideration of the potential dynamic or transactional nature of this association,” wrote Jackson M.A. Hewitt, MSc, Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and study coauthors. “This longitudinal study with maternal and child self-reports of depression leveraged a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) to explicitly test the directionality across 4 waves of data.”
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Using data from the All Our Families (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) cohort, which included 1801 mother-child dyads, researchers analyzed measures of child and maternal depression collected when the children were aged 10.3 (between May and July 2020), 10.9 (between March and April 2021), 11.6 (between November 2021 and January 2022), and 12.8 (between January and March 2023) mean years. Child sex and household income were also assessed as moderating factors.
At the between-participants level, the analysis found a stable association between maternal and child depression throughout the study period. However, within-participant increases in child depression scores at ages 10.3 and 10.9 years were associated with increases in maternal depression scores at child ages 10.9 (standardized coefficient 0.12; 95% CI, 0.02-0.22) and 11.6 (0.17; 95% CI, 0.07-0.26) years. A similar pattern was not observed for maternal depression and subsequent child depression.
The analysis also indicated that the observed associations were moderated by household income (Δχ212 = 23.0; P = .03). “Specifically, the cross-lag patterns were more persistent over time in higher-income compared with lower-income households,” the authors explained. Child sex did not have any moderating effect (Δχ212 = 10.8; P = .54).
“Contrary to prevailing assumptions, these findings suggest that children’s depression over time may have contributed to worsening maternal depression, rather than the other way around,” the researchers concluded. “While these results should be replicated in nonpandemic contexts to confirm their generalizability, they highlight the need for family-centered approaches to mental health care.”
