Effects on Children
Children’s Personal Well-being
Children’s personal well being is crucial for their development. It is composed by different
factors; it includes how children feel about themselves; and how they view life in general.
Children’s personal well being can be jeopardized when a mother is suffering from depression.
The consequences can range in different levels depending on the degree of maternal depression.
Chronic, severe levels of maternal depression are associated to simultaneous child injury risk
from birth to age three (Schwebel, & Brezausek, 2008). And the consequences of maternal
depression don’t limit to physical harm, maternal depressive symptoms in infancy are critical to
the prediction of the child’s symptoms in middle childhood and adolescence (Bureau et al.,
2009). Children of depressed mothers showed symptoms of depression themselves at ages 8 and
19 supporting the hypothesis that children who are exposed to maternal depression during their
early years of life are at higher risk for developing depression and other psychological problems
in their adolescent and adult life.
Maternal depression can affect children’s life in different
ways; it can affect how children view life and it can predispose them to suffer different
psychological problems; a study done by Lee and Gotlib (1991) found that children of
psychiatric patient mothers showed some improvement in their psychosocial functioning
following the mothers' symptomatic improvement. However, difficulties with children's
internalizing problems persisted. Previously depressed mothers reported significantly greater
internalizing problems in their children than did women in the community group. It has also been
found that maternal depression can negatively affect children’s future behavior. A study
evaluated the impact of postnatal depression on a child’s risk for violent behavior and found that
the child’s violence was predicted by the mother’s postnatal depression. Violence was associated
with symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Hay, Pawlby, Angold, Harold, &
Sharp, 2003). When a mother is suffering from depression, she might neglect her own children.
Sometimes without noticing she might not be paying enough attention to the child and as this
would have negative consequences. Maternal depression can also be very harmful for the
mother-child relationship, especially if maternal depression is accompanied by other problems. A
study conducted by Morrel, Dubowitz, Kerr, & Black (2003) found that mothers who are
depressed as a consequence of violence tend to have children who have behavior problems. A
similar study found that maternal depressive symptoms constitute a risk for offspring when these
symptoms coincide with problematic parenting. Maternal negativity is related to toddler
problem, and some of these problems persist in late childhood (Leckman-Westin, Cohen, &
Stueve 2009). The findings of these studies are important because they proved that children’s
personal well being can be very affected when a mother is suffering from depression, especially
in their first years of life, and they also showed that even when the maternal depressive
symptoms improved, children are still at risk to develop psychological problems themselves in
their late childhood.