Predictors of change in depressive symptoms from preschool to first grade

Abstract

Children's depressive symptoms in the transition from preschool to school are rarely investigated. We therefore tested whether children's temperament (effortful control and negative affect), social skills, child psychopathology, environmental stressors (life events), parental accuracy of predicting their child's emotion understanding (parental accuracy), parental emotional availability, and parental depression predict changes in depressive symptoms from preschool to first grade. Parents of a community sample of 995 4-year-olds were interviewed using the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment. The children and parents were reassessed when the children started first grade (n = 795). The results showed that DSM-5 defined depressive symptoms increased. Child temperamental negative affect and parental depression predicted increased, whereas social skills predicted decreased, depressive symptoms. However, such social skills were only protective among children with low and medium effortful control. Further, high parental accuracy proved protective among children with low effortful control and high negative affect. Thus, interventions that treat parental depression may be important for young children. Children with low effortful control and high negative affect may especially benefit from having parents who accurately perceive their emotional understanding. Efforts to enhance social skills may prove particularly important for children with low or medium effortful control.

Childhood Depression: Relation to Adaptive, Clinical and Predictor Variables

“…In addition, when introducing all the sub-dimensions, we confirmed as predictors nine variables that explain 56.4% of the variance: many internalizing problems (anxiety, sadness, loneliness); low family self-concept (the family provides a low level of satisfaction); high level of anxiety (nervousness, worry, fear, tendency to feel overwhelmed by problems); low responsibility (low interest in school work), low personal self-assessment , (low global rating as a person), high social stress (due to interactions with others), few behaviors of peer bullying (as perpetrator), health/psychosomatic problems (physical problems, headaches, stomach ache…), and external locus of control (attribution of consequences to external factors). Hence, the results confirm the predictions and ratify studies that have found that anxiety (Kovacs and López-Durán, 2010), health and adaptation problems, problems in interpersonal relationships (Wang et al, 2016), poor social skills (Reinfjell et al, 2016), and low self-esteem (Babore et al, 2016) predict childhood depression.…”

“…Among them, we note the study of Wang et al (2016), which confirmed problems of health and adaptation, interpersonal relations, and academic achievement as predictors of suffering depressive symptoms between ages 7 and 17. Reinfjell et al (2016) observed that difficult infant temperament and parental depression predicted an increase in depressive symptoms, whereas social skills predicted their decrease. Lack of social support (Colman et al, 2014), childhood and adolescence behavior problems (Kosterman et al, 2010), adverse experiences in childhood (Poole et al, 2017), and low self-esteem (Babore et al, 2016) also predicted depression.…”

Depression and Anxiety in Preschoolers

“…Other work has focused on the heritability/genetics 57–60 associated with early-onset depression and more specifically, a large body of literature has linked parental history of depression and related psychopathology to preschool-onset depression in their children 29,42,43,61,62 . For example, a recent epidemiological study found two distinct pathways linking pre- and post-natal maternal depression to adolescent depressive symptoms, one pathway through preschool irritability symptoms and another through preschool anxiety/depressive symptoms 43 .…”

“…Early childhood temperament has emerged as a risk factor for depression in both preschool and at older ages 19,29,42,43,61,63–65 . For example, in a multi-method, multi-informant longitudinal study of preschoolers, early childhood temperament (age 3) was assessed using the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Lab-TAB) where each child participated in a standardized set of 12 tasks designed to elicit positive and negative affectivity, as well as inhibitory control 29 .…”

Latent trajectories of internalizing symptoms from preschool to school age: A multi-informant study in a high-risk sample

“…A similar pattern was found regarding maternal somatization and stress, thus extending the literature on predictors for internalizing trajectory classes. As has been discussed earlier (e.g., Goodman et al, 2011;Reinfjell et al, 2016), it is likely that there are multiple complex pathways through which maternal depression, somatization, and stress are associated with the development of internalizing symptoms in offspring, among them genetic (Plomin, 1990), neurobiological (stress regulation system), and social (e.g., modeling and parenting) pathways. As maternal psychopathology and stress are such strong predictors, presumably affecting the child's development through multiple pathways, interventions to reduce maternal depression and stress might prove especially beneficial (cf.…”