The interplay between maternal depressive symptoms and marital distress in the prediction of adolescent adjustment

We examine the nature and directionality of paths among maternal depressive symptoms, marital distress, and adolescent depressive and externalizing symptoms in 506 adolescent-mother dyads, Structural equation models, used with data from three measurements, were conducted to examine the specificity of marital distress and maternal depressive symptoms as potential mediators of one another in the prediction of adolescent adjustment Findings from static and dynamic, autoregressive models supported pathways whereby marital distress mediated effects of maternal depressive symptoms on adolescent externalizing symptoms and maternal depressive symptomatology mediated effects of marital distress on adolescent depressive symptoms.