A recent University of Missouri study found that mothers who are struggling with the depression they tend to take longer to respond to their child during back-and-forth dialogue. The findings provide the basis for further research to determine whether the slower response time has long-term effects on children’s language development, vocabulary or academic achievement.
The results of research were published in the scientific journal Infant and Child Development.
Mothers with Depression: Why Do Their Children Take Longer to Respond?
Nicholas Smith, an assistant professor at the MU School of Health Professions, and his team listened to audio recordings from more than 100 families involved in the Early Head Start program, a federal child development program for children whose family income is at or below the federal poverty line. Some of the moms involved were struggling with depression, and Smith’s team documented how much time passed between a mother and her child’s responses during back-and-forth dialogue.
“We found that the time interval between responses, in general, shortened between mother and child as the child ages, and we also found that the mother’s timing tended to predict the child’s timing and vice versa,” she said. said Smith.
“Mothers and babies are in sync. Babies who were slower to respond to mom often had moms slower to respond to baby, and babies who were quicker to respond to mom had moms quicker to respond to baby. The significant new finding was that moms who were more depressed took longer to respond to their baby than moms who were less depressed.
“Mothers and babies are in sync. Babies who were slower to respond to mom often had moms slower to respond to baby, and babies who were quicker to respond to mom had moms quicker to respond to baby. The significant new finding was that moms who were more depressed took longer to respond to their baby than moms who were less depressed.
In the longitudinal study, using audio recordings, they compared the response time of back-and-forth dialogue between mothers and children when the children were 14 months and 36 months old. Going forward, Smith plans to further study dialogue response times for the same individuals that were recorded in this study when the children were in kindergarten and also when they were in fifth grade to examine how these effects play out later. in children development.
“The overall goal we hope to achieve is to better understand how mother-infant interaction works, as well as the underlying mechanisms and potential factors at play,” Smith said. “Once we identify which factors drive positive developmental outcomes and which factors potentially impair development, we can better identify children at risk and then tailor potential interventions towards those who can benefit the most.”
About one in 10 women in the United States will experience depression, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The consequences, however, could extend to their children, report researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, who have found that a mother’s depression can negatively affect a child’s cognitive development up to age 16.
The researchers interviewed about 900 healthy children and their mothers living in Santiago, Chile, at five-year intervals from infancy through age 16. age-appropriate learning materials. The children were assessed on verbal cognitive skills using standardized IQ tests during each assessment. The mothers were tested for symptoms of depression.
“We found that mothers who were very depressed did not invest emotionally or in providing educational materials to support their child, such as toys and books, as much as mothers who were not depressed. This, in turn, had an impact on the child’s IQ at ages 1, 5, 10 and 16,” said Patricia East, PhD, researcher in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “The consistency and longevity of these findings speak to the lasting effect depression has on a mother’s parenting and child development.”
On a scale of one to 19, the mean verbal IQ score for all children in the study at age 5 was 7.64. Children who had severely depressed mothers were found to have a mean verbal IQ score of 7.30 compared with a score of 7.78 in children without mothers with depression.
“Although seemingly small, the differences in IQ from 7.78 to 7.30 are very significant in terms of the children’s verbal skills and vocabulary,” East said. “The results of our study show the long-term consequences a child can experience as a result of chronic maternal depression.”
During the study period, at least half of the mothers were found to be depressed based on a questionnaire with questions such as, “Are you sad?” and “Do you find yourself crying?”
“For the mothers in the study, there were many stressors in their lives. Most of the mothers, while literate, had only nine years of education, did not work outside the home and often lived with extended families in small, crowded homes, factors that likely contributed to their depression,” East said. “Many mothers experience depression in the first six months after giving birth, but for some, the depression persists.”
East said the study data suggests that about 20 percent of mothers who are severely depressed when their baby turns 1 remain depressed for a long time.
“For healthcare professionals, the findings show that early identification, intervention and treatment of maternal depression are critical,” East said. “Providing resources to depressed moms will help them manage their symptoms productively and ensure their children reach their full potential.”
The study authors said future steps include further analysis of the data to see how maternal depression affects children’s depressive symptoms throughout childhood and adolescence and children’s educational attainment and health, such as their likelihood of being overweight or obese.
Postnatal depression (PND) can impact the quality of mother-child relationships in later life and have a negative influence on the quality of relationships between grandmothers and grandchildren, new research from the University of Kent has found.
Postnatal depression is known to have a negative effect on mothers’ relationships with their children. This has a subsequent impact on child development from infancy to adolescence and affects emotional, cognitive and physical development in children.
Now, research led by Dr. Sarah Myers and supervised by Dr. Sarah Johns at the School of Anthropology and Conservation has found that postnatal depression continues to impact mother-child relationships in later life and affects relationships as well. multigenerational.
They interviewed 305 women mainly from the UK and the US with an average age of 60 and who had given birth to an average of 2.2 children. Their children ranged in age from 8 to 48, with an average age of 29, and many now had children of their own. This wide-ranging dataset allowed them to assess the impact of postnatal depression over a longer period of time than previously examined.
Their data showed that women who had postnatal depression reported lower relationship quality with their offspring, including those children who are now adults, and that the worse the PND was, the worse the subsequent relationship quality was.
While mothers who exhibited depressive symptoms at other times had worse relationships with all of their children, postnatal depression was found to be specifically detrimental to the relationship mothers had with their child whose birth triggered PND.
This suggests that factors influencing mother-infant relationships in early childhood may have lifelong consequences on the relationship that forms over time.
Another research finding was that women who experience postnatal depression with a child, and then in later life become grandmothers through that child, form a less emotionally close relationship with that grandchild. This continues the negative cycle associated with PND as the importance of grandmothers in helping with the rearing of grandchildren is well documented.
The researchers hope the findings will encourage the continued development and implementation of preventive measures to combat PND. Investing in prevention will not only improve mother-child relationships, but future grandmother-grandchild relationships as well.
The paper, titled Postnatal depression is associated with detrimental lifelong and multigenerational impacts on relationship quality, was published in the open access journal PeerJ .
Mothers suffering from postnatal depression are unlikely to have more than two children, according to research by evolutionary anthropologists at the University of Kent and published by Evolution, Medicine and Public Health.
Until now very little was known about how women’s future fertility is affected by the experience of postnatal depression.
A research team at Kent’s School of Anthropology and Conservation collected data on the complete reproductive histories of more than 300 women to measure the effect of postnatal depression on their decision to have more children. The mothers were all born in the early to mid 20th century, and most lived in industrialized countries while raising their children.
The team concluded that postnatal depression, particularly when the first child is born, leads to reduced fertility levels. Experiencing higher levels of emotional distress in her early postnatal period reduced a woman’s likelihood of having a third child, although it did not affect her having a second.
Furthermore, postnatal depression after both the first and second children deterred women from having a third child to the same extent that they would have had severe birth complications.
The research by Sarah Myers, Dr Oskar Burger and Dr Sarah Johns is the first to highlight the potential role postnatal depression has on population aging, where a country’s median age gets older over time.
This demographic change is mainly caused by women having fewer children and can have significant social and economic consequences. Given that postnatal depression has a prevalence rate of approximately 13% in industrialized countries, with emotional distress occurring in up to 63% of mothers with children, this research suggests that investing in screening and preventative measures to ensure good mental health maternal can now reduce the costs and problems associated with aging populations at a later stage.
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