A new study has found that when parents are diagnosed with depression, it can have a significant negative impact on their children’s performance at school.
Researchers at the Drexel University led a team from Stockholm, Sweden, and the University of Bristol in England in a cohort study. The teams looked at more than a million children born from 1984 until 1994 in Sweden. Using computerized data registers, the scientists linked parents' depression diagnoses with their children's final grades at age 16, when compulsory schooling ends in Sweden.
The research indicated that children whose mothers had been diagnosed with depression are likely to achieve grades that are 4.5 percentage points lower than peers whose mothers had not been diagnosed with depression. For children whose fathers were diagnosed with depression, the difference is a negative four percentage points.
Put into other terms, when compared with a student who achieved a 90 per cent, a student whose mother or father had been diagnosed with depression would be more likely to achieve a score in the 85-86 per cent range. The magnitude of this effect was similar to the difference in school performance between children in low versus high-income families, but was smaller than the difference for low versus high maternal education (low family income: -3.6 percentage points; low maternal education -16.2 percentage points).
Some differences along gender lines were observed in the study. Although results were largely similar for maternal and paternal depression, analysis found that episodes of depression in mothers when their children were 11-16 years old appeared to have a larger effect on girls than boys. Girls scored 5.1 percentage points lower than their peers on final grades at 16 years old when that factor was taken into account. Boys, meanwhile, only scored 3.4 percentage points lower.
Depression diagnoses in a parent at any time during the child's first 16 years were determined to have some effect on the child's school performance. Even diagnoses of depression that came before the child's birth were linked to poorer school performance. The study posited that it could be attributed to parents and children sharing the same genes and the possibility of passing on a disposition for depression.
