The roles of attachment style and maternal depression in the development of childhood depression

This study aimed to determine how stable parent ratings of their infant's temperament/attachment style is across one year of development and establish if there is a specific pathway that leads to child depression and or internalizing and externalizing behaviors originating with maternal depression or insecure attachment styles between the infant and their mothers. The data for this study was collected as part of a multisite, randomized trial of Hawaii's Healthy Start Program (HSP) (Duggan et al., 2004). The Hawaii Healthy Start Program (HSP) is a home visiting program targeted at families at-risk of child abuse and neglect. The racial and ethnic characteristics for total participants are as follows: 12 percent identified as White, 9 percent identified as Asian, 13 percent identified as Pacific Islander, 20 percent identified as Filipino, 20 percent identified as Native Hawaiian, 27 percent identified as Black/ Multiracial (Duggan et al. 1999). The mean age for participating mothers was 23.4 (SD = 5.8) and 68 percent of the families had incomes belopoverty line (Duggan et al., 1999). The following measures were used in the present study: The Bate's Attachment Scale, The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), The Child Behavioral Checklist (CBCL), and The Children's Depression Inventory (CDI). Unlike the majority of literature, the present findings suggest that maternal depression and attachment issues during the first year of life served as only a very modest risk for future child internalizing symptoms. Similar to the findings regarding child depression, relations between parent and teacher rated externalizing symptoms, maternal depression, and attachment were fairly small. Only for parent rated externalizing symptoms there was a small association between externalizing score and maternal depression and a small association between parent rating of externalizing behaviors and parent ratings of child attachment. Keywords: child depression, child externalizing behaviors, maternal depression