Does Mother–Child Interaction Mediate the Relation Between Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Children’s Mental Health Problems?

Abstract

The relation between maternal depressive symptoms and children’s mental health problems has been well established. However, prior studies have predominantly focused on maternal reports of children’s mental health problems and on parenting behavior, as a broad and unilateral concept. This cross-sectional study examined specific observed mother–child interaction behaviors through which maternal depressive symptoms are assumed to affect children’s mental health problems. We expected higher rates of maternal depressive symptoms to predict higher rates of children’s mental health problems, and we expected this relation to be mediated by low maternal warmth and high maternal psychological control. The sample consisted of 111 mother–child dyads referred for treatment. The mother–child interaction behaviors were coded according to the observed mother–child interaction tasks. Children’s mental health problems were assessed using both maternal reports and children’s self-reports. As expected, the results showed that maternal depressive symptoms were strongly related to maternal reports of children’s internalizing and externalizing mental health problems. Surprisingly, maternal depressive symptoms were unrelated to children’s self-reported depressive symptoms. Furthermore, mother–child interactions did not mediate the relation between maternal depressive symptoms and child mental health problems. Maternal depressive symptoms were associated with high maternal warmth, and high psychological control was associated with high levels of mother-reported externalizing mental health problems in children. These results partially replicate previous findings but add to these by using observational methods and multi-informant data. The importance of using a multi-informant and multi-method approach in assessing children’s mental health problems in clinical practice and research are discussed.

Systematically Defined Informative Priors in Bayesian Estimation: An Empirical Application on the Transmission of Internalizing Symptoms Through Mother-Adolescent Interaction Behavior

“…adolescent internalizing symptoms (van Doorn et al, 2016). One possible reason for this finding may be that mother-adolescent interaction behavior is more likely to influence immediate, shortterm emotions in mothers or adolescents.…”

“…A carefully constructed and justified weighting scheme that is tailored to the specific research question is essential when specifying informative priors. To avoid arbitrary and subjective decisions, expert knowledge can inform this process (Bolsinova et al, 2017;van de Schoot et al, 2018;Veen et al, 2020). Expert knowledge as input for prior distributions has been previously used to estimate the size of parameters for which no data was available (e.g., Hald et al, 2016) or to complement existing data (e.g., van de Schoot et al, 2018).…”

“…However, if informative priors are not chosen carefully or are weakly defined, Bayesian estimation methods may perform poorly and result in biased estimates (Depaoli, 2013;Holtmann et al, 2016). Therefore, a systematic and transparent approach is essential when specifying informative priors (Zondervan-Zwijnenburg et al, 2017;van de Schoot et al, 2021). The present study highlights the use of different approaches to systematically define informative priors and the integration of new data to answer novel research questions.…”

“…Bayesian estimation with informative priors increases the precision of the posterior distributions by updating previous information with new data and thus gradually accumulating knowledge. While the frequentist approach regards parameters of interests as unknown, but assumes that there is only one true parameter value in the population, the Bayesian approach regards parameters of interest as uncertain and describes them with a probability distribution (van de Schoot et al, 2014). By combining previous information with new data from the analyses, Bayesian estimation allows researchers to make assumptions about model parameters, such as curtailing or excluding certain parameter values (Zondervan-Zwijnenburg et al, 2017).…”

Associations between maternal depressive symptoms, children’s behavioral problems and perceptions regarding family interactions

“…Studies have identified the negative impact of maternal depressive symptoms on different childhood outcomes, including internalizing and externalizing behavior problems (Ahun et al, 2018;Van Doorn et al, 2016). This association will be highlighted below, with empirical studies and scientific literature reviews, with emphasis on the influence of family interactions on the behavioral outcomes of school-age children, the focus of the present study.…”