Within‐family relations of mental health problems across childhood and adolescence

Abstract

Background: While transactional models suggest that parent and child mental health reciprocally influence one another over development, research has largely focused on parent-to-child effects. Additionally, it is not known whether observed associations hold when appropriate statistical tools are used to operationalise within-family dynamics. Methods: We investigated within-family mental health dynamics using autoregressive latent trajectory models with structured residuals, stratified by child gender. Parental psychological distress was assessed using the Kessler (K6) scale, and children's internalising and externalising problems were assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Both measures were administered at the age 3, 5, 7, 11, 14 and 17 waves of the Millennium Cohort Study (N = 10,746, ~50% female). Results: Maternal psychological distress was positively associated with subsequent internalising and externalising problems for girls but only with internalising problems for boys. Paternal psychological distress was associated with boys' later internalising and externalising problems during early adolescence. Among boys, internalising problems were associated with later maternal psychological distress, while externalising problems were associated with later paternal psychological distress. Among girls, internalising problems were associated with subsequent paternal psychological distress, while externalising problems were associated with later maternal psychological distress. Finally, maternal and paternal psychological distress showed negative bidirectional associations in early childhood but positive associations in middle childhood and early adolescence. Conclusions: Findings support a transactional model of family mental health, with both child-to-parent and parent-to-child effects playing a role in the development of mental health difficulties. Mental health intervention efforts should, therefore, target the whole family system.

Associations between Student-Teacher Bonds and Oppositional Behavior Against Teachers in Adolescence: A Longitudinal Analysis from Ages 11 to 15

“…These randomintercepts are allowed to covary and thereby account for stable between-person effects that may be associated with both student-teacher relationships and oppositional defiant behaviors towards teachers. This specification thus allows the model to implicitly control for stable between-person covariates such as ethnicity or socio-economic status, making the explicit inclusion of such covariates in the model unnecessary (Speyer et al, 2022). Subsequently, the cross-lagged section of the analysis allows for the investigation of time-lagged associations between the two selected measures while controlling for the autoregressive pathways estimating the association between the within-person deviations of the variables at time t with time t +1 .…”

Annual Research Review: Stability of psychopathology: lessons learned from longitudinal population surveys

“…Within‐person homotypic paths ranged between .19 and .41 for internalizing problems and between .36 and .64 for externalizing problems (standardized coefficients); cross‐lagged paths between <.05 (no effect sizes were given for nonsignificant paths) and .24. Gender‐specific ALT‐SR analyses on six waves (age 3–17 years) of the same cohort yielded roughly comparable figures (Speyer, Hall, Hang, Hughes, & Murray, 2022). Murray et al.…”

“…(2020) did not find consistent indications for such a trend, and Speyer et al. (2022) reported it for internalizing, but not externalizing problems. Heterotypic stability estimates do not show consistent age effects either, possibly partly due to the reversal of the direction of the within‐person effect of externalizing problems on internalizing problems suggested above.…”

Does emotion dysregulation mediate the association between ADHD symptoms and internalizing problems? A longitudinal within‐person analysis in a large population‐representative study

“…Models were unadjusted for covariates because the fact that in the ALT‐SR each individual is compared to themselves over time means that it automatically adjusts for unmeasured time‐stable between‐person effects (Speyer, Hall, Hang, Hughes, & Murray, 2021 ). This may include, for example, the potential confounding effects of gender, genetics, and stable aspects of the family environment.…”