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A child’s depression can cause their mother to experience depression, a new study from the University of Calgary suggests.
“As caregivers, we tend to take on what might be a struggle or a difficulty for the child. And we can carry that sometimes through subtle ways or overt ways,” said Sheri Madigan, senior author of the study, published in Jama Pediatrics in August.
Research has long found that a parent’s depression can lead to a child’s depression, says Madigan, who is a registered psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Calgary.
But this study found the opposite. In it, children’s depressive symptoms were associated with their mothers having elevated depressive symptoms a year later.
The study did not find that children had higher depressive symptoms after their mothers reported elevated depressive symptoms.
“We weren’t seeing that mom’s depression was predicting later increases in the child’s depression at any time point,” said Madigan.
‘Health of the family’
The study tracked depressive symptoms of 1,801 Calgary-based mothers and their children between 2020 and 2023. The children were between the ages of 10 and 13 during the study.
Children and their mothers were asked to answer questions about their depressive symptoms four times throughout the study. These questions measured a person’s self-reported feelings of depression; they were not clinical diagnoses of depression.
The researchers’ goal was to look at the “directionality” of depression, said Madigan.
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“Is it that maternal depression spills over onto the child, or is it that the child’s depression might evoke some sense of hopelessness in the caregiver, and that in turn, creates elevations in their own depressed mood?”, she said.
This study indicates that a child’s depressive moods can create more depressive moods for their mother. This was true for both sons and daughters.
These findings could impact how doctors respond when children are experiencing depression, Madigan says.
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“Instead of treating kids as the sole patient in the equation, it’s really about working with the family and working on the health of the family,” she said, noting a child’s depression can affect both parents and siblings.
Impact of the pandemic
The study has some limitations.
The researchers studied children entering adolescence because depression often begins then. Adolescence can be a stressful time in parent-child relationships, because children are gaining more independence while parents are learning to give their children more autonomy.
But the study was also conducted during the pandemic, an especially stressful time for families. Increased screen time and the loss of structured physical activities, such as children’s sports, may have contributed to an increase in children reporting depressive symptoms during that period, the report says.
Families were spending more time at home together, which could also make it easier for mothers to notice and be impacted by their children’s depressive symptoms, the report says.
“[Parents] could actually see what was going on for their child, and they could feel a sense of hopelessness,” said Madigan.
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“One of the hallmark reasons why people feel depression is because they feel like there is a sense of hopelessness and a lack of controllability [and] predictability. And those are the things that just generally were ever-present during the pandemic for everyone.”
Need for replication
More research is needed to confirm the study’s findings.
Studies that examine depression among children and parents during non-pandemic periods, or that look at how fathers and children are impacted by each other’s depression, may be helpful, says Madigan.
“With a study like this, that is relatively novel, you’d be looking to replicate that study and get a body of research that validates that it’s true,” said Michael Cooper, vice-president of data and partnerships at Mental Health Research Canada. The organization has published several studies about family mental health.
Depression often has a genetic component, so it is not surprising that children and mothers will both report higher levels of depression, says Cooper.
Most parents of young children are between the ages of 25 and 40, and that age group also reports more depression and anxiety, he says.
He also says children’s screen time and cost of living concerns make parenting more stressful today than for previous generations.
“Being a parent is more challenging now than it would have been 30 years ago,” he said.
This study’s results need to be replicated in other studies before it can be said with certainty that a child’s depression causes depression for mothers, he says.
But its results still add to the body of information about how mental health impacts families.
He hopes to see other research in this area. More studies could help determine whether children’s poor mental health leads to mothers experiencing poor mental health, he says, and could also give “a better sense of why” this may happen.
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