Paternal Depression and Adolescent Psychosocial Maturity: Does Father Warmth Matter More for Daughters than Sons?
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 8.1% of women and 4.6% of men reported a major depressive episode in the past year. Important gender differences in the assessment, treatment, and effects of depression also exist. For example, women are 70% more likely to experience depression in their lifetimes than are men, but according to the CDC, men experiencing depressive episodes are four times more likely to commit suicide, and twice as likely to abuse substances as women. How does this affect the rest of the family? Women’s Studies minor, Wendi Frederickson, is studying what could happen to children who grow up in families where one or both parents are depressed. She and Family Life professor, Erin Holmes, are taking a family systems approach which alerts us to the possibility that many levels of relationships exist, and each relationship affects all other relationships in the family. For instance, if a father is depressed, his depression will affect his wife and his children. This study looks at mothers’ depression and fathers’ depression within the same family over the course of ten years. Growth mixture modeling is used to determine what different typologies of depression exist within the families who participated in the study. Then each depression typology is analyzed to determine if they are related to levels of psychosocial maturity in adolescent daughters and sons in each family. Adolescence is a time when youth are developing their identities and preparing for adulthood, but when an adolescent has grown up with depressed parents, her or his ability to cope with the world and new responsibilities could be affected. Other studies researching links between depression and youth, have either overlooked fathers’ depression or did not have information about chronicity of both parents’ depressive symptoms in the family over time. This study hopes to fill in those gaps. Wendi will present her research findings during the Women’s Studies Capstone Conference held on April 4 and 11, 2014.