Emotional availability and social skills: A link between mother-child depressive symptoms

Abstract

This research examined the intergenerational transmission of depressive symptoms from mothers to their adult children through two succeeding mediators: a child's perception of emotional availability from their mothers, and a child's social skills. To do so, this study integrated principles from the integrative model of risk from depressed mother to offspring, attachment theory, and the social skills deficit theory of depression. Child reports of depressive symptoms, perceived emotional availability from mothers, and social skills were assessed as well as mother reports of depressive symptoms from 224 (N = 448) mother-child dyads. Results showed that maternal depressive symptoms were significantly related to child perceptions of emotional availability. Moreover, emotional availability was positively related to child social skills, which in turn was negatively related to child depressive symptoms. Additionally, the indirect effect from maternal depressive symptoms to child depressive symptoms through the mediators was significant. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Are emotionally competent adults emotionally available parents? Examination of theoretical and empirical relationships in a video‐recorded parent–child interaction clinical preschool‐aged sample

“…It allows parents to keep their own and the child's emotions separated as they process their emotional information, allowing them to examine their own motivations and needs, which enables them to react sensitively to the child's emotional signals, to structure the child's activities, to avoid intrusive behavior, and to act in a nonhostile way (Emde, 1980). In turn, this may trigger the child's responsiveness and involvement in the parent-child interaction (T. Curran, 2016). Thus, the underlying constructs imply that recognizing emotions facilitates EA.…”