!99S. Vol. 100. No. 4, 475-477 il Psychoiosy Copyright 199! by ihe American Psychological Association, inc. 002I-M3X/»I/».00 Adjustment of Children of Depressed Mothers: A 10-Month Follow-Up Catherine M. Lee University of Ottawa Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Ian H. Gotlib University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada There is considerable concern about the adjustment of children of depressed mothers. Earlier we studied the specificity of these difficulties to maternal depression. Child adjustment difficulties were evident in 7- to 13-year-old children of both depressed and nondepressed psychiatric patient mothers but not in the children of community mothers or nondepressed medical patient mothers (Lee & Gotlib, 1989a). This report describes a 10-month follow-up of 44 of these subjects. Despite the alleviation of maternal depressive symptomatology, children in the 2 psychiatric groups contin- ued to manifest adjustment difficulties that were evident to both clinicians and mothers. These findings suggest that the adjustment difficulties found in the children of psychologically distressed mothers do not abate within the 1st year after the mothers' recovery. A growing body of evidence indicates that children of de- pressed mothers are at risk for a number of social and emotional adjustment difficulties (Hammen et al, 1987; Weissman et al, 1984). In earlier reports (Lee & Gotlib, 1989a, 1989b), we have described the results of an investigation designed to examine the specificity of these adjustment difficulties to maternal de- pression. We assessed the functioning of children (ages 7-13) of depressed psychiatric patient mothers, nondepressed psychiat- ric patient mothers, nondepressed medical patient (arthritic) mothers, and community mothers. We found that while the depressed patients were in episode, there were few differences between the children of the depressed and the nondepressed psychiatric patients. Children in both these groups differed, however, from offspring of the arthritic and the community mothers, which suggests that child adjustment difficulties are associated with maternal psychological distress in general, rather than with maternal depression per se or with global ma- ternal disability. Although single-point assessments have identified the risk to which children of depressed parents are exposed, recent longi- tudinal data suggest that child adjustment difficulties are evi- dent months (Hammen, Adrian, & Hiroto, 1988) and even years (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1988) after an episode of parental depression. Consequently, questions have been raised in regard to the relation between improvement in parental symptomatol- ogy and child adjustment (Gelfand & Teti, 1990). Although early reports suggested that an alleviation of maternal depres- sive symptomatology is associated with an improvement in child functioning (eg, Weissman, 1983), the results of more recent studies suggest that the impairment of children of de- The research reported in this article was funded by Grant 923-85/87 from the Ontario Mental Health foundation to Ian H. Gotlib. We thank Patricia Peters, Elaine Scharfe, and Michelle Picard for their assistance in data collection and analysis. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Catherine M. Lee, Child Study Centre, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario KIN 6N5, Canada. pressed parents may be more prolonged, extending beyond the time of the parent's recovery. Moos and his colleagues (Billings & Moos, 1986; Holahan & Moos, 1987), for example, have examined the relation between parents' ratings of their own adjustment and parents' ratings of their children. In a 1-year follow-up study, Billings and Moos (1986) found that although parents whose depression had remit- ted reported that their family social environments had im- proved, they continued to report difficulties in their children. In contrast, parents whose depression had not remitted over the course of a year reported difficulties both in family functioning and in their children. Thus, parents whose depression had re- mitted and those whose depression had continued both de- scribed their children as functioning more poorly than did con- trol parents. In a subsequent reanah/sis of these data, Holahan and Moos (1987) found a significant association between ma- ternal depression at the initial evaluation (Time 1) and mater- nal ratings of child adjustment at follow-up. Because no exter- nal ratings of child adjustment were obtained, however, it is not possible to rule out the hypothesis that ratings from depressed parents reflect a negative bias. In another recent study, Cox, Puckering, Pound, and Mills (1987) obtained both parental and observer ratings of the 2- year-old children of mothers diagnosed with nonpsychotic de- pression. At a 6-month follow-up assessment, approximately one third of the mothers were found to have recovered from their depression. Cox et al. reported that children of the recov- ered mothers showed less disturbance than children of nonre- mitted mothers but greater disturbance than children of control mothers. Finally, Forehand and McCombs (1988) recently re- ported a significant relation between mothers' scores on the Beck Depression Inventory and the adjustment of their adoles- cents assessed 1 year later. It appears, therefore, that there may be a lag between recov- ery from maternal depression and improvement in child func- tioning. Initial results from our study (Lee & Gotlib, 1989a) indicated that at a 6- to 8-week follow-up, children of both de- pressed and nondepressed psychiatric patients continued to 473 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.