The prevalence of maternal depression was investigated in the mothers of 96 children: 30 premature infants at risk for the development of cerebral palsy; 35 premature infants considered not to be at risk for the development of cerebral palsy; and 31 healthy fullterm infants. There were equally high levels of depression in all three groups of mothers, regardless of birth status, prediction of di...

Touch is a critical channel of communication used by mothers to communicate and interact with their infants and to contribute to their infants' socio-emotional development. The present study examined maternal touching in 41 mothers with and without depressive symptomatology. Mothers and their 4-month-old infants participated in the Still-Face (maternal emotional unavailability) and Separation (...

The way a mother responds to her infant is vital for the development of a healthy child-caregiver attachment. Specific delivery types have been linked to important neurohormonal activity that can interfere with a parent’s acquistion of thoughts and behaviors facilitating healthy parenting (Swain et al., 2008). James Swain and colleagues (2008) discovered mothers who deliver vaginally (VD), comp...

Children of depressed mothers have impaired cognitive, behavioral, and health outcomes from infancy through adulthood, and are especially at risk when maternal depression persists over multiple years. But there are several important limitations to our current descriptive knowledge about maternal depression, especially depression among unmarried mothers. Data from the Fragile Families and Child ...

Child social anxiety is common, and predicts later emotional and academic impairment. Offspring of socially anxious mothers are at increased risk. It is important to establish whether individual vulnerability to disorder can be identified in young children. The responses of 4.5 year-old children of mothers with social phobia (N = 62) and non-anxious mothers (N = 60) were compared, two months be...

There is growing evidence that brooding rumination plays a key role in the intergenerational transmission of major depressive disorder (MDD) and may be an endophenotype for depression risk. However, less is known about the mechanisms underlying this role. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to examine levels of brooding in children of mothers with a history of MDD (n = 129) compared to...

In low-income countries, perinatal depression is common, but longitudinal data on its influence on child health are rare. We examined the association between maternal depression and febrile illness in children. There were 654 mother/child dyads in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire that were enrolled in a prospective birth cohort in 2010–2011 and underwent 2-years of follow up. Mothers were examined for d...