Elsevier

The Journal of Pediatrics

Volume 190, November 2017, Pages 251-257
The Journal of Pediatrics

Original Articles
Timing and Chronicity of Maternal Depression Symptoms and Children's Verbal Abilities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2017.07.007Get rights and content

Objective

To test the associations between the timing and chronicity of maternal depression symptoms (MDS) and children's long-term verbal abilities.

Study design

Participants were 1073 mother-child pairs from a population-based birth cohort in Canada. MDS were assessed at ages 5 months, 1.5, 3.5, and 5 years using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. Verbal abilities were measured at 5, 6, and 10 years using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R). Multiple linear regression models were used to estimate the association between timing (early: 5 months and/or 1.5 years vs late 3.5 and/or 5 years) and chronicity (5 months, 1.5, 3.5, and 5 years) of exposure to elevated MDS and children's mean PPVT-R scores.

Results

Children exposed to chronic MDS had lower PPVT-R scores than children never exposed (mean difference = 9.04 [95% CI = 2.28-15.80]), exposed early (10.08 [3.33-16.86]) and exposed late (8.69 [1.85-15.53]). There were no significant differences between scores of children in the early compared with the late exposure group. We adjusted for mother-child interactions, family functioning, socioeconomic status, PPVT-R administration language, child's birth order, and maternal IQ, psychopathology, education, native language, age at birth of child, and parenting practices. Maternal IQ, (η2 = 0.028), native language (η2 = 0.009), and MDS (η2 = 0.007) were the main predictors of children's verbal abilities.

Conclusions

Exposure to chronic MDS in early childhood is associated with lower levels of verbal abilities in middle childhood. Further research is needed in larger community samples to test the association between MDS and children's long-term language skills.

Section snippets

Methods

Data were drawn from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development, whose protocol was approved by the Quebec Institute of Statistics and the Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Centre ethics committees. Participants were recruited via the Quebec Birth Registry using a stratified procedure based on living area and birth rate. The initial sample included n = 2120 infants born in Quebec in 1997-1998. Our analysis sample included n = 1073 mother-child pairs for whom data was available for MDS at

Results

Our analysis sample (n = 1073) significantly differed from our initial cohort sample (n = 2120). Mothers included in our analysis sample were less likely to have male children (50% in analysis sample vs 57% in initial sample, χ2 = 9.31, P = .002), be unemployed (45% vs 55%, χ2 = 22.39, P  < .0001), have a high school diploma (14% vs 23%, χ2 = 13.50, P = .004), be single parents (14% vs 22%, χ2 = 35.36, P  < .0001), report higher MDS (1.41 vs 1.68, F = 14.47, P = .0001), and to come from a low

Discussion

The objective of this study was to model the association between the timing and chronicity of MDS in early childhood (first 5 years of life) and children's long-term verbal abilities (5-10 years). In our population-based birth cohort (n = 1073), 37.8% of mothers reported elevated MDS (eg, experiencing few symptoms a lot of the time or many symptoms at least some of the time over the past week) at least once during the first 5 years of the target child's life. However, only children exposed to

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      The latent variable maternal distress did not have a significant direct effect on receptive vocabulary scores at any age, but was indirectly associated with PPVT scores at Pre-K and Grade 5 via the home environment. Previous research found that infants with mothers exhibiting depressive symptoms tended to have lower receptive vocabulary knowledge at older ages than infants of non-depressed mothers (Ahun et al., 2017; Letourneau et al., 2013a, 2013b); other research found a negative (concurrent) association between parenting stress (PSI-SF scores) and children’s PPVT scores at 2–4 years of age (Noel et al., 2008). In our study, the two maternal variables (maternal distress, maternal education) exhibited significant negative covariance and contributed in opposite ways to the quality of the home environment, which in turn, was associated with PPVT scores.

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    Supported by the Ministère de la Santé et des Services Sociaux Québec, the Lucie et André Chagnon Foundation, the Ministère de la Famille Québec, and the Institut de la Statistique du Québec. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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