How Dad’s Mental Health Can Impact Children

Over recent years, more and more attention has been given to postpartum and peripartum depression. As mothers have begun to share their stories more openly—and tragedies involving postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis have been covered with more nuance in the news media—the broader discussion has very likely led to increased awareness and more people being connected to the help they need.

But conversations about parental mental health shouldn’t stop with mothers, and they shouldn’t stop as the baby grows older. In fact, new research suggests that when a father experiences depression, the effects on his children can be pervasive.

The study, led by Kristine Schmitz at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, appeared recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study was analyzed, which included a random sample of births among 20 large American metropolises from 1998 to 2000. That original study is ongoing and continues to track the child and parent participants.

In the most recent research, 1,422 children and their fathers were studied. The majority of these families did not involve married parents, though 74% of the fathers lived with their children at least half the time. When the children in the study were 5, their fathers were screened for depressive symptomology. This was done using the WHO’s Composite International Diagnostic Interview Short Form (CIDI-SF) Version 1.0, a highly valid and reliable tool that uses the criteria for a depressive episode as laid out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for mental disorders. Four years later, those same children were assessed by their teachers on a number of measures, including behavioral assessments and ADHD measures.

With socioeconomic factors and maternal depression controlled for, children of depressed fathers were more likely to have oppositional behavior (including defiance and anger) and hyperactive symptoms (including restlessness). On average, those children had an 11% lower social skills score than the children of dads who had not had depressive symptoms four years before. And the children of depressed dads had a 25% higher score on problematic behaviors.

Of course, as always, correlation does not equal causation. Might the children have simply inherited a tendency toward depression and it was showing up already in the form of their behavioral disruption and restlessness?

It is also worth noting that several years elapsed between the fathers rating their depression symptomology and the children’s behavior being assessed. Was it not the depression itself but rather something ensuing over the course of those years that led to the children’s relatively heightened struggles?

Notably, that premise central to this whole discussion—that the ripple effects of parental depression can be wide, and it’s not just depression itself that can be harmful in parenting, but rather the mechanisms that it may spur into motion. Perhaps depression makes fathers more emotionally distant, more short-tempered, less likely to initiate physical affection, or less likely to initiate time together. Perhaps children pick up on more threat and negativity in the world at large when their parents are more prone to seeing it that way. Perhaps fathers who are depressed interact with the world differently, and so neighbors, community members, teachers, and extended family are less likely to be as involved and supportive with the child’s life. Perhaps depressed fathers are more prone to use certain types of punishment that can increase aggression and behavioral problems in their kids. The possibilities of the mechanism are numerous, but the connection between paternal depression and childhood behavior is strong.

And now, with classroom disruptions, and childhood mental health issues as a whole showing no signs of abating, it’s more important than ever to explore the specifics of the connection—and not shy away from the conversation.