Study: Depressed Mothers Respond to Their Children Slower

According to a recent study by the University of Missouri, depressed mothers take more time to respond to their children during back-and-forth conversations. The results form the basis for additional research to ascertain whether the children’s language development, vocabulary, or academic outcomes are impacted in the long run by the slower response time.

The Early Head Start program, a federal child development program for children whose family’s income is at or below the federal poverty line, was studied by Nicholas Smith, an assistant professor at the MU School of Health Professions, and his team after listening to audio recordings of more than 100 families who were involved in the program. Smith’s team measured the amount of time between responses for a mother and her child during back-and-forth conversations since some of the parents participating were dealing with depression.

“We found that the time gap in between responses, in general, gets shorter between mother and child as the child ages, and we also found the mom’s timing tended to predict the child’s timing and vice versa,” Smith said.

“Mothers and children are in sync. Children who were slower to respond to their mom often had moms who were slower to respond to the child, and children who were faster to respond to their mom had moms who were faster to respond to the child. The significant new finding was that the moms who were more depressed took longer to respond to their child compared to moms who were less depressed.”

In the longitudinal study, scientists compared the reaction times of back-and-forth conversations between mothers and their children at 14 months old and 36 months old using audio recordings. Smith intends to investigate how these impacts manifest later in the children’s development by looking at the dialogue response time for the same individuals who were recorded in this study while the kids were in pre-kindergarten and also when they were in fifth grade.

“The overall objective we are hoping to accomplish is to better understand how mother-child interaction works as well as the underlying mechanisms and potential factors at play,” Smith said. “Once we identify what factors drive successful development outcomes and what factors potentially impair development, we can better identify at-risk children and then tailor potential interventions toward those that can benefit from them the most.”

The research is published in the journal Infant and Child Development.

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