Mothers’ depressive symptoms appear to affect children’s socio-emotional development, partly through parenting practices

A new study adds to a body of research on how parents’ personality and mental health influences children’s socio-emotional and cognitive-motor development. The findings, published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development, suggest that parenting practices play a mediating role in the equation.

Psychology studies continue to find evidence that a parent’s personality and psychopathology impact their children’s development. According to a well-known model of parenting described by Jay Belsky in 1984, parents’ characteristics partly dictate their parenting styles. For example, mothers with high neuroticism have been found to use less supportive parenting.

Expanding on these ideas, study author Alejandro Vásquez-Echeverría and his team proposed that a mother’s characteristics — like depression and personality traits — likely influence children’s development through the mother’s parenting practices. Importantly, while all of these variables are interrelated, most studies have examined them separately. Vásquez-Echeverría and his colleagues sought to explore how these different parenting processes interact, using cross-sectional data from a nationally representative, Latin-American sample.

“The most traditional and widely used models of parenting and its consequences on child development include a series of predictors such as, for example, the caregiver’s mental health and personality traits as well as the socio-economic position of the household,” explained Vásquez-Echeverría, a full professor at the University of the Republic at Montevideo in Uruguay.

“However, few studies have analyzed all these variables simultaneously in their relationship with parenting practices and socio-emotional and cognitive child development. This is important because in general all these factors have important inter-relationships. Understanding how these factors act together to shape child development can be useful in improving the design of public policies or in informing the work of professionals who aim to promote child development or positive parenting.”

Free daily newsletter

The researchers analyzed data from an early childhood survey of Uruguayan families, called the Nutrition, Child Development and Health Survey (ENDIS). The researchers focused on data reported by mothers, with a final sample of 4,693 children (between the ages of 0 months and 6 years) and their mothers. In addition to demographic measures like household income, mothers completed measures of depressive symptoms and the Big Five Personality traits — extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.

Mothers also completed assessments of their child’s behavior, with items designed to assess cognitive-motor development and socio-emotional development. An interviewer additionally conducted an observation of the child in their home environment, which included assessments of the caregiver’s aggressiveness/hostility toward the child and their warmth/affection toward the child.

The results revealed that mothers’ personality traits were tied to children’s developmental outcomes. Mothers who scored lower in neuroticism and higher in extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness tended to have children with better cognitive-motor development and fewer behavioral problems. Mothers who were older, reported higher household income, had fewer depressive symptoms, and engaged in positive parenting also tended to have children with better cognitive-motor and socio-emotional development.

The researchers then applied path analyses to further explore the relations between these variables. This revealed that socio-emotional development was directly tied to mothers’ parenting practices and depressive symptomology. Further, parenting practices and maternal depression partly accounted for the relationship between household income and children’s socio-emotional development. In general, maternal depression appeared to be more strongly associated with children’s socio-emotional development than personality.

Further, parenting practices partly explained the relationship between mothers’ depressive symptoms and children’s socio-emotional issues. The authors say this is in line with research suggesting that depressed mothers tend to be less emotionally responsive. A lack of responsiveness may produce an unfavorable and less stimulating environment for the child, harming their socio-emotional progress.

Parenting practices were also directly associated with children’s cognitive-motor development. Mothers’ openness and household income were indirectly related to children’s development, through parenting practices. According to the study authors, these findings attest to the crucial role of positive parenting in children’s cognitive-motor development.

“The effects of the distal variables (e.g. personality, socioeconomic status) on child development were to a great extent explained by the intermediate variables, notably parenting practices,” Vásquez-Echeverría told PsyPost. “In other words, we found associations between higher levels of depressive symptoms, lower household socioeconomic status, and lower parental openness on the one hand, and mothers with less warm and harsher parenting practices on the other hand. Overall, our study helps to better nuance the respective roles of the core antecedents of parenting practices and their influence on child outcomes.”

Vásquez-Echeverría and his team acknowledge that causality cannot be established since their study relied on cross-sectional data. Future longitudinal studies may shed further light on the directional relationship of the variables. Nonetheless, they say their results may help inform interventions for young children and their mothers.

The study, “Role of parenting practices, mother’s personality and depressive symptoms in early child development”, was authored by Alejandro Vásquez-Echeverría, Lucía Alvarez-Nuñez, Meliza Gonzalez, Tianna Loose, and Fanny Rudnitzky.