30 research outputs found
Spillover between marital quality and parent–child relationship quality: Parental depressive symptoms as moderators.
The Differential Impact of on Children of inter and intra community Violence in Northern Ireland
Changes in marital conflict and youths' responses across childhood and adolescence: A test of sensitization
Bidirectional effects between maternal mental health and adolescent internalizing problems across six years in Northern Ireland.
BackgroundEmerging evidence indicates the existence of bidirectional relations between mothers' mental health and adolescent adjustment, but few studies have examined these relations in contexts of high environmental adversity, including economic deprivation and political violence. Given other empirical connections between political violence and adolescent adjustment problems, the impact of child adjustment problems on maternal mental health may be exacerbated in contexts of sectarian violence.MethodsAddressing this gap, latent change score modeling was used to examine interrelations between trajectories of maternal mental health and adolescent internalizing symptoms over time in communities afflicted by political conflict. Over six years, 999 adolescent-mother dyads participated in a longitudinal study in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Six-hundred ninety-five families were originally recruited in year 1, with 304 recruited to supplement the sample in year 3; the largest available sample for a given year was 760 dyads. Models including maternal mental health, adolescent internalizing symptomatology, and political violence (i.e., sectarian antisocial behavior) as a time-varying covariate were tested.ResultsResults demonstrated that for both mothers and adolescents in a dyadic pairing, higher rates of symptomology in one member of the dyad were related to symptoms observed in the other member. Results also suggest that political violence and factors related to social deprivation increased symptoms across the dyad.ConclusionThis study advances understanding of the bidirectional impact between maternal mental health and adolescent internalizing over time in contexts of political violence