Poster #28 - Maternal Mental Health and Children’s Cognitive and Socioemotional Outcomes in Chile

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Objectives: Depression is a widespread health issue. Evidence shows that maternal depression and stress negatively impact children’s behaviour and emotional problems and cognitive skills. Less is known about the potential protective impact of mothers’ sense of competence on their children’s outcomes. Mothers’ characteristics likely influence the stimulation available to children and opportunities to interact with them. This study focused on an underrepresented population from the Global South, analysing a nationally representative sample of Chilean children and their mothers. We investigated the relations between maternal mental health and children’s cognitive and behavioural and emotional problems. Specifically, we examined how mothers’ depression, parental sense of competence and stress were related to children’s math skills, receptive vocabulary, and internalizing and externalizing problems.
Methods: Participants were 10,867 mother-child dyads enrolled in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study in 2017 when children were 7 to 12 years old. Mothers’ mental health measures included depression (Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression), parental sense of competence (Parenting Sense of Competence Scale), and stress (Parent Stress Index Short form). Children’s cognitive measures included executive function (EF; Hearts & Flowers, Backward Digit Span Task), receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test), math skills (Woodcock Tests), and socioemotional measures included internalizing and externalizing problems (Child Behavior Checklist).
Results: Correlation analysis showed that, in mothers, depression, parental sense of competence and stress were related between them. In children, receptive vocabulary was related to math skills, math skills were related to EF, and receptive vocabulary was related to EF. Parenting satisfaction was negatively related to internalizing and externalizing problems. Depression was related to CBCL (both internalizing and externalizing problems). Parental stress (dysfunctional parent-child relationship, difficult child, and total distress) was related to internalizing and externalizing problems. Maternal mental health measures were not related to children’s cognitive skills. Children’s internalizing and externalizing problems were not strongly related to cognitive skills. Children’s age had a moderate effect on EF skills. Gender had a very weak effect on the studied variables.
Conclusion: Findings suggest that mothers who are more satisfied with their role as caregivers perceive their children as having fewer behavioural and emotional problems. Mothers who experience more parenting stress and those who are depressed perceive their children as having more behavioural and emotional problems. These findings highlight the importance of promoting mothers’ sense of competence and preventing and treating maternal stress and depression, as it affects their perception of their child, which in turn is likely to impact their daily interactions. A limitation of this study is that fathers were not assessed on the same mental health measures. Future studies could investigate protective factors preventing maternal mental health issues from affecting their children’s cognitive skills.
Keywords: maternal depression, parental stress, socioemotional skills, cognitive skills.

Authors

• Carolina Alvarez, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Dénes Szücs