(PS5-A4) From Partners to Parents: How Depression and Child Temperament Contribute to Parenting Sense of Competence

Background: According to action control theory (Dix & Branca, 2003), depressive symptoms may undermine parenting competence through differential appraisals of child behaviours (e.g., promoting negative attributions). Mothers with depressive symptoms may perceive children negatively because depressive symptoms bias appraisals (e.g., lower the threshold for what is experienced as aversive; Dix & Meunier, 2009). However, it could also reflect the accurate appraisal that children of mothers with depressive symptoms display high rates of difficult behaviour (e.g., temperament; Porter & Hsu, 2003). In a recent study, maternal depression and difficult temperament were associated with decreases in maternal parenting competences (Takács et al., 2019). However, only maternal reports were assessed, failing to account for father’s depression and perceptions of parenting competence. Therefore, our study sought to examine the potential sex-specific effects of both parents’ depressive symptoms and reports of child temperament on parenting sense of competence. We also sought to examine the potential moderating role of child temperament on the association between depressive symptoms and sense of competence.



Methods: A nested multilevel model was used to assess the associations between parental depressive symptoms, child temperament, and parenting sense of competence over the transition to parenthood. Couples (N = 98) having their first child participated at four time points: prenatally and one, two, and four years postnatally. The demographics of the sample were representative of the population examined.



Results: Slopes of depressive symptoms in fathers (β = -0.427, p < .001) and mothers (β = -.440, p < .001) over the transition to parenthood were negatively associated with parenting sense of competence over time. In addition, father’s perceptions of difficult child temperament were related to lower increases in parenting sense of competence over time (β = -0.004, p = .048) whereas for mothers, perceptions of difficult child temperament were associated with a lower initial sense of parenting sense of competence (β = -0.221, p = .041) but did not predict change over time. Child temperament did not moderate the association between depressive symptoms and sense of competence for either parent (β_male = -0.009, p = .188; β_female = 0.009, p = .211). In terms of self-reports of child temperament, there were no differences between fathers and mothers (t(161) = -.295, p = .768).



Conclusion: The inclusion of both parents in this study allowed the sex-specific pathways to be examined, since research on depressive symptoms in parents typically focuses on maternal postpartum depression during the transition to parenthood (Dix & Meunier, 2009). The study also supported research that mothers’ reports of child behaviour are often corroborated by fathers, teachers, and objective observers (e.g., Luoma et al., 2004) and suggests that paternal depression is an important determinant of fathers’ parenting sense of competence. In addition, perceptions of difficult child temperament by both parents uniquely predicted their own lower parenting sense of competence, but this did not interact with depressive symptoms.