Depressed caregivers show more hostility and less warmth towards children

Is your child’s caregiver suffering from depressive symptoms? In a recent study designed to determine how caregivers respond to children’s needs for support, researchers learned that caregivers suffering from depression exhibited greater hostility and less warmth towards children. The study, designed to be a pre-intervention research examining how caregiver depressive symptoms affect proper care management, examined caregivers of 100 low-income children with persistent asthma. It videotaped them while completing structured tasks with the children and their families: a loss task where the children were asked to share a known sad event with their family; and a conflict task where they were asked to resolve a known conflict with their parents.

 

According to the study, caregivers with higher levels of depressive symptoms showed less warmth and greater hostility towards children during both tasks. Findings also indicate that while it is expected of caregivers to exhibit greater hostility during the conflict task, caregivers with moderate to severe symptoms showed a significantly higher rise in hostility from the loss to conflict tasks compared to those with only minimal to mild symptoms.

 

Be the first to hear about the most up-to-date news and tips on How to Stop Depression by signing-up for our site updates.