It's Daddy/Daughter Day at the suicide prevention hotline!
Is it nature, or is it nurture? Or, does it really matter? When it comes to the mental health of children, parents assume quite a bit of responsibility. Most of the time, that burden falls squarely on the mother (at least according to Freudians). As it turns out, fathers have more of a role in mental health than first realized. A father’s depression may negatively affect the emotional health of his children, a new study reveals.
“For years we’ve been studying maternal depression and how it affects children, but the medical community has done a huge disservice by ignoring fathers in this research,” said New York University professor of pediatric medicine Michael Weitzman, the leader of the research project which will appear in the journal Pediatrics. “These findings reinforce what we already assumed — that fathers matter, too, and they matter quite a lot.”
The rates for parental depression resulting in child mental health concerns are quite staggering. If both parents have good mental health, only 6 percent of children display emotional or behavioral problems. If the father is depressed, that number rises to 11 percent; if the mother is depressed, that number rises to 19 percent. If both parents are depressed, 25 percent of children from those relationships display serious emotional or behavioral problems. You’d need a lot of chocolate and blue lights to soothe that kind of mental health problem.
Tags: weird science, mental health, emotional health, depression, father depression rubs off on children, parental depression affects children, New York University, Michael Weitzman, pediatric medicine, psychology, emotional problems, Pediatrics, depression and children, parental depression and children, depressed parents lead to depressed kids
