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Children, whose mothers experience rising levels of depression from the period before pregnancy until the months just after giving birth, can develop emotional, social and academic problems, a recent study has shown.
Gabrielle Rinne, a UCLA psychology graduate student, lead author of the study, said, "Our findings suggest that increases in mother's symptoms of depression from preconception to postpartum contribute to children's lower attention and behavioural control, which can raise the risk of problems across the life span."
"Parents should know, however, that this can be addressed through early childhood intervention."
For the study, the researchers followed a group of 362 women in 2 phases.
In the first phase, the women were followed through a subsequent pregnancy and were interviewed on four occasions about their symptoms of depression -- once before becoming pregnant, twice during pregnancy and again approximately three months after their baby's birth.
During the study, just under 75% of the women reported low symptoms of depression that didn't change over the study period, while 12% had low symptoms that significantly increased and 7% had persistently high symptoms.
For the second part of the study, the researchers followed 125 of these women several years later. When their children were 4, or preschool age, the mothers were asked to describe in detail their child's temperament and behaviour. Then, at age 5, the children performed a task requiring focused attention.
Children, whose mothers showed symptoms of depression during the pregnancy period, performed significantly worse on focused tasks than those whose mothers had reported consistently low symptoms of depression. Interestingly, there were no differences in performance between kids whose mothers had experienced consistently high depression and those whose mothers had consistently low depression.
"This study suggests that a pattern of increasing depression may adversely affect children," said senior author Christine Dunkel Schetter, a distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at UCLA who had a lead role in study design and in interview development. She noted that not all of these kids are destined to experience problems but emphasized that "they are at higher risk of socio-emotional and behavioural issues and problems at school."