Study: Depression in fathers and children linked

This study has been published in the journal 'Development and Psychopathology'.

According to Jenae Neiderhiser, distinguished professor of psychology and human development and family studies at Penn State and co-funded faculty member of the Social Science Research Institute, "a lot of research focuses on depression within biologically related families." "Adoptive families and blended families now have access to more information."

In the 720 families taking part in the Nonshared Environment in Adolescent Development (NEAD) study, with more than half of those families having a stepparent who is responsible for raising children, the researchers examined naturally occurring variations in genetic relatedness between parents and their adolescent children.

Burt, who has worked on projects with Neiderhiser since the early 2000s, said that the findings "pointed clearly to the environmental transmission of sadness and behaviours between fathers and children." "A crucial validation of our findings came from the fact that we still saw these relationships in a sample of "blended" families where the father was biologically related to one participating child but not to the other. We also discovered that a significant portion of this effect seems to be a result of parent-child conflict. These kinds of findings strengthen the case that parent-child conflict influences teenage behaviours in the environment."

Neiderhiser claims that although the results were anticipated, people also believed that genetically related parent-child couples would experience a stronger influence on children's behaviour and sadness.

More research on the step and blended families should be done, she thought. They are frequently an underutilized natural experiment from which we could learn more about how to separate the effects of genetic and environmental factors on families. (ANI)