Poster #31 - Maternal Depression and Coercive Parenting: Protective Effects of Maternal Social Support for Economically Strained Families during Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Social learning theories (Patterson, 1982; Scaramella & Leve, 2004) suggest that harsh, rejecting, and inconsistent parenting behaviors, often characterized by coercive parent-child interactions with young offspring, contribute to the development of children’s externalizing problems (Hoeve et al., 2009). The quality of early mother-child interactions is influenced by multiple factors, including depression and economic strain (Belsky, 1984; Elder, 1974). Longitudinal evidence for the protective effect of social support on later depression and parent-child interactions has primarily emerged from the perinatal period (Ohara et al., 2017) and infancy (Milgrom et al., 2019). However, there is limited longitudinal research during the middle and latter stages of early childhood (i.e., ages 2 to 5) on the potential contribution of high levels of maternal support directly reducing maternal depressive symptoms and indirectly leading to fewer coercive parent-child interactions.

This study expands on prior work by considering maternal social support as a protective factor for depression and dyadic coercion using data from 731 low-income families (96% mothers, 50% White, 28% Black/African American) at risk for child conduct problems from urban, suburban, and rural communities. Families were recruited from WIC programs to participate in a RCT of the Family Check-Up (FCU) intervention and were assessed when children were ages 2, 3, and 4. The baseline assessment at age 2 was conducted before families in the intervention arm received the FCU. We tested a path model (see figure) from higher maternal social support (General Life Satisfaction Scale; Crnic & Greenberg, 1983) at age 2, to lower depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression; Radloff, 1977) at age 3, to lower levels of observed coercive mother-child interactions at age 4 (Relational Affective Coding System; Peterson et al., 2008). We also tested a more conservative autoregressive model accounting for change in maternal depressive symptoms and in dyadic coercion from baseline. Covariates at age 2 included economic strain (income-to-needs ratio), child externalizing behavior (CBCL), maternal education, maternal race/ethnicity, intervention status, and site.

The path models both demonstrated good fit. Greater social support was related to higher subsequent maternal depressive symptoms in both models. An indirect effect of greater social support on lower levels of coercive parent-child interactions through maternal depression was observed in the first path model but was attenuated in the autoregressive change model. No direct effect of social support on later dyadic coercion was found. Our findings underscore the protective contribution of maternal social support on later depressive symptoms during early childhood and the potential for social support to indirectly contribute to lower levels of mother-child coercion and subsequent child disruptive behavior during middle childhood. Furthermore, our basic research findings highlight the potential for family-focused interventions to utilize maternal social support as part of a standard protocol to identify mothers at risk for depression and subsequent compromised caregiving, which can exacerbate child problem behavior during early and middle childhood (Smith et al., 2014).

Authors

• Luciano Dolcini-Catania, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Melvin N Wilson, University of Virginia -Charlottesville

• Daniel S. Shaw, University of Pittsburgh