The authors examined the relationship between maternal depression, paternal psychopathology, and adolescent diagnostic outcomes in a community sample of 522 Australian families. They also examined whether chronic family stress, father's expressed emotion, and parents' marital satisfaction mediated the relationship between parental psychopathology and adolescent outcomes. Mother's education, child's gender, and family income were covaried in all analyses. Results revealed that maternal depression and paternal depression had an additive effect on youth externalizing disorders. In addition, maternal depression interacted with both paternal depression and paternal substance abuse in predicting youth depression but not youth nondepressive disorders. Chronic family stress and father's expressed emotion appeared to mediate the relationship between parental psychopathology and youth depression.

Identification of distinct PTSS trajectory groups has implications for understanding the course and treatment of PTSS in children.

This study was designed to explore the role of perceived parenting behavior in the relationship between parent and offspring anxiety disorders in a high-risk sample of adolescents. We examined the relationship between parental and child anxiety disorders and tested whether perceived parenting behavior acted as a mediator between these variables. Analyses were performed on a high-risk sample of 816 fifteen-year-olds drawn from a birth cohort in Queensland, Australia. Parental depression and income were covaried. Maternal anxiety disorder significantly predicted the presence of anxiety disorders in children; the association between paternal anxiety disorder and child anxiety disorder was not significant. There was no evidence that perceived parenting played a mediating role in the association between mother and child anxiety disorders. These results replicate earlier studies' findings of elevated rates of anxiety disorders among the offspring of anxious parents, but only when the child's mother is the anxious parent.

Clinicians cannot rely only on clinical level symptoms in parents to identify high risk families but include families where the parent has subclinical level symptoms.

Objectives: This study investigated trauma symptom trajectories of children 2–16 years old following admission to pediatric intensive care and identified factors that predicted a child’s trauma symptom trajectory. Design: Prospective longitudinal design. Setting: Two tertiary care PICUs in Brisbane, Qld, Australia. Patients: Children 2–16 years old admitted to PICU for longer than 8 hours. Measurements Main Results: Maternal reported child posttraumatic stress symptoms (n = 272) on the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Young Children were used to assess posttraumatic stress symptoms up to 12 months post admission. Semiparametric group-based trajectory analyses were completed to identify patterns over time. Age, gender, length of stay, premorbid functioning, maternal perceived threat to life, and maternal acute distress were assessed as potential risk factors. Three likely trajectory groups were identified. The majority of children were resilient (83.8%); however, a significant minority experienced chronic symptoms (12.9%) or elevated stress symptoms which resolved quickly (3.3%). After controlling for other variables, maternal report of premorbid internalizing behavior significantly predicted both chronic (odds ratio, 6.3) and recovery (odds ratio, 38.0) trajectories. Maternal acute distress significantly predicted child chronic symptom trajectories (odds ratio, 5.2). Conclusions: Children with elevated trauma symptoms postintensive care need timely and effective intervention. The majority of children with high levels of acute symptoms will continue to have chronic, ongoing posttraumatic stress symptoms. In addition, acute maternal distress and preexisting internalizing child behavior predict ongoing psychologic distress after discharge from the PICU. Screening in the acute period post-PICU admission may identify children likely to experience ongoing chronic posttraumatic distress symptoms and enable targeted treatment of children at risk. This is the first study to examine symptom trajectories in children following pediatric intensive care admission and includes a sample of very young children.