What is the Relationship Between Depression and Anxiety in Parents and Children?

ByPrimary Researcher

Executive Summary

  • Parents and children highly influence each other.
  • The topic of this article is to look at the research into this relationship.

Introduction

Childhood depression is extremely rare. This is expressed in the following quotation.

“While many people think of depression as an adult condition, roughly 3% of children experience depression as well.” – Very Well Mind

Three percent experience depression, so suicidal thoughts are even less common than this.

What Drives Suicidal Thoughts in Most Children That Have Them?

A major factor in suicidal thoughts in young children is family problems particularly related to limited resources. So poor families, etc. This means that the majority of suicidal children are financially deprived in some way. This might mean they are forecasting a grim future for themselves based on their current condition.

How about children who come from very financially stable homes? In that case, the reasons should surely be investigated as it is rare. It should be logical that if financial reasons (the most common reason) are excluded, some other trigger should be quite prominent in the child’s life.

Research Into Parental Anxiety and Childhood Anxiety and Depression

The following is a quote from a study on this linkage.

The current study examined relations between parent anxiety and child anxiety, depression, and externalizing symptoms. In addition, the study tested the additive and interactive effects of parent anxiety with parent depression and externalizing symptoms in relation to child symptoms. Forty-eight parents with anxiety disorders and 49 parents without any psychiatric disorder participated with one of their children (ages 6 to 14 years; 46.4% male; 75.8% Caucasian). Parent anxiety was related to both child anxiety and depression, but not child externalizing symptoms. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that only parent externalizing symptoms had additive effects, beyond parent anxiety symptoms, in relation to child anxiety symptoms. Further, parent anxiety symptoms moderated the relationship between parent and child externalizing symptoms, such that the strength of this relationship was reduced in the presence of high levels of parent anxiety symptoms. Results of this study illuminate the role of parent comorbidity in understanding relations between parent and child symptoms.

As hypothesized, we found that parent anxiety symptoms were significantly related to both child anxiety and depression symptoms, indicating that one risk factor may predict more than one problem. These results are consistent with several previous studies that have found parent anxiety to predict both child anxiety and depression problems (e.g., Biederman et al. 1991; Turner et al. 1987), – NCBI

This study shows the linkage between parental anxiety and childhood depression. This is not at all difficult to see as likely. The child has a strong attachment to the parent and will pick up on the emotions and stresses of the parent.