Significantly higher levels of antisocial behavior were found in seven-year-old children whose mothers were depressed during the child’s first five years of life, according to an article in the February issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.
“Children of depressed mothers have elevated conduct problems, presumably because maternal depression disrupts the caregiving environment,” according to background information in the article. Researchers have identified three possible explanations for the association between a mother’s depression and antisocial behavior (ASB) in their children: 1) depressed women are likely to have antisocial personality traits related to depression, 2) are likely to bear children with antisocial men, 3) and the children of depressed mothers may inherit a genetic predisposition for antisocial disorders.
Julia Kim-Cohen, Ph.D., from King’s College London, and colleagues investigated the association between maternal depression and children’s ASB. Participants were members of the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, which examined how genetic and environmental factors affected the development of 1,116 sets of twins in England and Wales. The mothers categorized the timing of their depression as: never depressed (n = 728), depressed only before twins’ birth (n = 68), depressed only after twins’ birth (n = 193), and depressed before and after twins’ birth (n = 124). Children’s ASB at ages five and seven was determined from mother and teacher reports.