Latent profiles of child health and wellbeing in the context of maternal depression

• In Event: 3-007 - Children from At-Risk Home Contexts

Abstract

Physical health and psychosocial wellbeing in childhood sets the foundation for developmental trajectories and outcomes across the life course, highlighting the importance of maintaining positive health for children. Importantly, child health and wellbeing is explicitly linked with maternal health, including mental health. Thus, maternal depression, a unique, yet not uncommon mental illness, presents a concern not only for the health of the mother, but also for the health of her offspring. While maternal depression has been identified as a significant risk factor for poorer child physical health and psychosocial wellbeing, from a resilience perspective, it is important to consider the heterogeneity in how individuals adapt in the context of stressful situations, like maternal depression. Much of the current literature on maternal depression has utilized a traditional variable-centered, deficit approach, focusing on the risk conferred by maternal depression to single indicators or domains of child health. However, wellbeing is a multidimensional construct of both physical and psychosocial strengths and limitations. Thus, latent profile analyses (LPA) were conducted to examine child health and wellbeing among 3,211 children aged 9 years old using multiple positive and negative indicators of physical and psychosocial health. LPA is a person-centered approach that generates mutually exclusive subgroups of individuals with a similar pattern of responses to a set of observed indicators. Multinomial logistic regression analyses were then conducted to examine differences in profile membership in the context of maternal depression. Analyses were guided by a resilience and life course perspective, and utilized data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. We found five distinct profiles of child health and wellbeing, suggesting the traditional dichotomy of healthy versus unhealthy may fail to capture the complex nature of child health and wellbeing for those experiencing maternal depression. Furthermore, we found that some children had differential physical and psychosocial health outcomes, revealing that children may exhibit resilient functioning in one domain of health and risk in another. Thus, focusing on a single domain of health may miss important aspects of resilient functioning. Results also showed that while maternal depression was associated with an increased risk of poor child health and wellbeing, they also emphasized the ability for children to achieve resilient functioning. Findings provide a more nuanced and complete examination of child health and wellbeing in the context of maternal depression, focusing on the potential for resilient functioning among at risk populations.

Author

• Sarah J Dow-Fleisner, University of British Columbia Okanagan
  Presenting Author