Parent-Child Interaction Among Depressed Fathers and Mothers

As expected, Families with a depressed parent showed decreased positively and congeniality compared with families without a depressed parent. In examining child depression, the research found substantial evidence that paternal communication served as a moderator of the risk associated with paternal depression. Their study included only families with no separation over a 5-year period.

The participants for this study were recruited in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of a broader study of family interaction among alcoholic and depressed families. Jacobs stressed that it was essential to provide further understanding of how parental depression is linked with risk for depression among children. By contrast, both paternal depression and father-child communication appeared to influence the child outcome.

Overall, maternal depression alone accounted for much of the child outcome variance, and mother –child communications variables did not appear to moderate the impact of maternal depression on child outcome. All the participants that satisfied the selection criteria were subjected to complete an extensive three week assessment, which included several laboratory interviews, interaction tasks, questionnaires, and home observations. All the participants were recruited through newspaper advertisements specifying that a research study at the University of Pittsburgh was seeking families with children in which either the mother or the father was experiencing depression.