Parenting stress mediates the longitudinal effect of maternal depression on child anxiety/depressive symptoms

Background: Evidence is lacking for the longitudinal bidirectional relationship between maternal depression and child anxiety/depressive symptoms through pre-school to adolescence and regarding parenting stress as having a mediating effect on this association. Methods: We performed a secondary analysis of data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study (n = 1,446 child-mother dyads in 20 main U.S. cities) collected at baseline, Year-5 (T1), Year-9 (T2) and Year-15 (T3) (from 1998 to 2017). Maternal depression, child anxiety/depressive symptoms and parenting stress were assessed at three time points (T1-T3). The associations were evaluated using autoregressive cross-lagged panel models. Results: Cross-lagged models indicated that 1) maternal depression significantly predicted subsequent higher child anxiety/depressive symptoms across all time points, and 2) greater child anxiety/depressive symptoms significantly predicted subsequent maternal depression across all time points. Furthermore, T1 maternal depression was indirectly associated with T3 child anxiety/depressive symptoms via T2 parenting stress [b = 0.010 (SE=0.004), p = 0.017]. However, T2 parenting stress did not significantly mediate the association between T1 child anxiety/depressive symptoms and T3 maternal depression [b = 0.004 (SE=0.004), p = 0.256]. Limitations: The FFCWS oversampled unmarried parents and had a higher proportion of socio-economically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority families, limiting the generalizability of findings. Conclusions: Maternal depression is indirectly linked to child anxiety/depressive symptoms via parenting stress.