Emotional Problems More Common for Kids with Depressed Parents

Scientists have determined in a new study that children who have a depressed parent tend to be at an increased risk of developing emotional and/or behavioral problems during childhood, adolescence, or adult life than peers in the same situations, but with healthy parents.

Kids who lived in families where both parents were depressed were at a considerably higher risk of suffering from the aforementioned conditions than their peers who only had one depressed parent.

The study again highlights the fact that adults need to watch their behavior around children, even if they don't feel like it. Getting rid of behavioral problems is an extremely complex task, for which there are no guarantees of success later on in life.

Scientists behind the new study say they analyzed kids between the ages of 5 and 17, belonging to about 21,000 families living in the United States. All of these participants were tracked for at least four years, and researchers constantly checked on the mental health status of test subjects' parents.

The team determined that the presence of depressed dads in the household made around 11 percent of all children in the study develop behavior problems. That is the equivalent of 1 in 10 test participants, PsychCentral reports.

However, nearly 20 percent of them showed similar symptoms when their mothers were found to be depressed. Scientists say that that is the equivalent of 1 out of 5 participants, a rate twice as high as when the fathers were depressed.

Nearly 25 percent (1 in 4) of all children started displaying signs related to behavioral and emotional problems when both parents suffered from depression. What the study suggests is that fathers' depression is a lot more important for the children than previously calculate, PsychCentral reports.

Details of the new investigation were published in the latest issue of the esteemed medical journal Pediatrics. However, the researchers are clear to point out no causal relationships could be determined between parental depression and kids' behavioral problem.

What the work suggests is that a correlation does exist. Scientists will now have to discover what that is, but such an effort will most likely take a long time to complete. However, scientists are very interested in discovering how the two conditions are related.