Mothers tackling depression slower in responding to their children

USA: Mothers struggling with depression are 11% slower in responding to their children compared to mothers with low depression risk, indicating that interactive timing of speech to children may be sensitive to maternal depression, a recent study has found.

The findings, published in the journal Infant and Child Development, provide the basis for further research to determine if the slower response time has any long-term impacts on the children’s language development, vocabulary or academic outcomes.

Nicholas Smith, an assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions, and his team listened to audio recordings of more than 100 families involved in the Early Head Start program, a federal child development program for children whose family income is at or below the federal poverty line. Some of the moms involved were struggling with depression, and Smith’s team documented how much time passed between responses for a mother and her child during back-and-forth dialogue.

“We found that the time gap in between responses, in general, gets shorter between mother and child as the child ages, and we also found the mom’s timing tended to predict the child’s timing and vice versa,” Smith said. “Mothers and children are in sync. Children who were slower to respond to their mom often had moms who were slower to respond to the child, and children who were faster to respond to their mom had moms who were faster to respond to the child. The significant new finding was that the moms who were more depressed took longer to respond to their child compared to moms who were less depressed.”

In the longitudinal study, they used audio recordings to compare the response time of back-and-forth dialogue between mothers and their children when they were 14 months old and 36 months old. In the future, Smith plans to study further the dialogue response timing for the same individuals recorded in this study when the children were in pre-kindergarten and also when they were in fifth grade to examine how these effects play out later on in the children’s development.

“The overall objective we are hoping to accomplish is to understand better how mother-child interaction works as well as the underlying mechanisms and potential factors at play,” Smith said. “Once we identify what factors drive successful development outcomes and what factors potentially impair development, we can better identify at-risk children and then tailor potential interventions toward those that can benefit from them the most.”

Reference:

Nicholas A. Smith, Valerie F. McDaniel, Jean M. Ispa, Bob McMurray First published: 28 November 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2389