Contrary to long held beliefs, new research suggests children’s mental health may be the trigger for maternal depression.
Maternal depression has not been found to predict the development of depression in their children and instead may be the other way around.
Canadian researchers found that in children who reported higher-than-expected depression symptoms at age 10 and 11 years, their mothers showed small increases in depression at age 11 and 12 years, respectively.
The All Our Families cohort was a study of 1800 mother-child pairs which ran between 2020 and 2024.
Child depression was measured using the Behaviour Assessment System for Children (BASC-3), while maternal depression was evaluated with the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale-10 (CESD-10).
These 4-point scale tools of depressive symptoms, ranging from “never/rarely” to “almost always/ most or all of the time” were completed at ages 10.3, 10.9, 11.6 and 12.8 years.
In the mothers in the cohort, three quarters had an annual family income greater than $100,000 CAD (approximately $108,000 AUD), more than 70% were married and 80% had attained higher education.
The mean mother age was 41 years, and half of the children were boys.
The widely accepted theory has been that parent depression precedes the onset, persistence and worsening of child depression.
But these findings challenge that, with authors concluding that children’s depression over time may contribute to worsening maternal depression.
Previous research in this area did not confirm these study’s findings. However, authors believed that large intervals of two or more years between data collection could not capture the nuances of timing of bidirectional effects.
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“This limitation is particularly relevant during periods of rapid changes and acute stress in mental health and development, such as the transition to adolescence or the onset of a global crisis, when symptoms may fluctuate, necessitating more frequent monitoring to accurately capture these temporal dynamics,” the authors wrote.
These limited prior studies also relied on parent-reported child depression only, rather than child-reported as in this study, potentially capturing a more accurate picture of symptoms, researchers said.
The age range in the study was a time of heightened developmental and environmental change, including a transition to puberty, deepening peer relationships and gaining greater autonomy and emotional sensitivity.
While the study may have captured these normative changes, the results may have been amplified by pandemic-related stressors, authors wrote.
They noted that the study should be replicated outside of the context of the pandemic, but that the results highlighted the need for a family-centred approach to mental health care.
“These findings suggest that emerging or increasing child depression symptoms can alter the family microsystem by activating or exacerbating maternal depression, rather than the reverse,” they wrote.
“Therapeutic interventions within a relational family lens may also be helpful, which is in line with recent calls for family-centred versions of paediatric mental health care that integrates parent mental health into collaborative care.”
