Parent and Parenting Risk Factors: Impact on Early Childhood Mental Health

This chapter reviews the extant literature on the associations between parent depression, parenting behaviors and attitudes, and mental health outcomes. Research consistently documents small to moderate effects of parent depression on child internalizing and externalizing outcomes. Explanations for these effects include genetic transmission, the social cognitive impact of parent modeling of depressive affect and negative attributions, and parenting characterized by inadequate sensitivity to children’s emotional cues and increased criticism and harshness. Some researchers find stronger relations between parent depression and externalizing disorders; others note stronger effects on internalizing disorders. Parent depression thus serves as a good example of the developmental psychopathology concept of multifinality in which the same risk factor manifests in different outcomes in different children. Parenting is posited as both a mediator of these differences and as an independent risk factor with significant direct effects on child outcomes. Researchers find associations between high levels of parent hostility and increased externalizing symptoms and between low parental warmth and increased internalizing problems. Parental lack of autonomy granting appears related to the development of anxiety symptoms in children. Both parent depression and parenting behaviors also manifest indirect effects on child outcomes through child variables of attachment and temperament.