Poster #28 - Parental Depression and Child Behavioral Outcomes: Can Schools Serve as Protective Factors?

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Depression among parents can have profound negative influences on child development and family functioning. An estimated 7.5 million parents in the United States experience depression each year, putting approximately 15 million children at risk for associated adverse outcomes (National Research Council, 2009). Multiple studies and meta-analytic reviews have documented the positive association between parental depression and children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors, starting in early childhood and continuing through adolescence (Goodman et al., 2011). While the literature to date has focused heavily on mediators linking parental depression to children’s development such as genetics, parenting behaviors and the home environment, the evidence is more limited in considering moderators which can disrupt (or exacerbate) this transmission. A nascent body of evidence suggests that schools can play an important role and may even serve to buffer against some of the adversities children experience in the home and neighborhood.

In this paper we analyze a large, nationally representative sample of children and parents drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class 2010-2011 (ECLS-K: 2011) to examine whether students’ sense of belonging or feelings of exclusion in school moderate the relationship between parental depression and children’s behavioral wellbeing, focusing on children in 5th grade. Data include multiple reporters, incorporating parent self-reports of depressive symptoms (coded dichotomously to indicate elevated depression levels), teacher reports of children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors, and children’s reports of their school’s climate. We estimated multilevel regression models to adjust for the nesting of children (N=3,512) within schools (N=274) and to consider both children’s perceptions of school climate compared to their schoolmates, and school-level climate overall.

Results (Table 1) found that parental depression and children’s feelings of school exclusion were associated with higher internalizing behaviors (β=0.19 and β=0.14 respectively), while children’s feelings of school connectedness were linked with lower internalizing problems (β=-0.12). In contrast, parental depression was not associated with externalizing problems, yet social exclusion, at both the individual (β=0.23) and school levels (β=0.18), was linked with higher externalizing behaviors. Cross-level interactions (Figure 1) suggest that school connectedness may also buffer against risks from parental depression. For children whose parents are at elevated risk for clinical depression, a one standard deviation (SD) difference in school-level reports of connectedness is associated with 0.68 SD lower internalizing behavior problems, a moderate-sized effect. In contrast, there is no statistically significant link between school-level reports of connectedness and internalizing among children whose parents are not depressed.

Together, these results suggest that feelings of school connectedness may help to protect children’s mental health, and that a school-wide culture of connectedness may be protective even in the face of heightened risk factors in the home environment. In contrast, feelings of exclusion appear to take precedence in regard to children’s externalizing behaviors. These findings have important implications for both educational policy makers and practitioners who are concerned with the ways in which school climate can bolster student well-being and moderate negative outcomes that are correlated with challenges in the family and home environment.

Authors

• Lindsay Lanteri, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Rebekah Levine Coley, Boston College