Mothers with depression take longer to respond to their child

Women who are depressed frequently take more time to respond to their children during back-and-forth conversations, according to a recent University of Missouri study. 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 shorter response time.
Assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions, Nicholas Smith and his team listened to audio recordings of more than 100 families involved in the Early Head Start program, a federal child development program for children whose family income is at or below the federal poverty line.
Smith said, “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. 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.”
He added, “The significant new finding was that the moms who were more depressed look longer to respond to their child than moms who were less depressed.” In the longitudinal study, using audio recordings, they compared the response time of back-and-forth dialogue between mothers and their children when they were 14 months old and 36 months old. Smith plans to further study the dialogue response timing for the same individuals recorded in this study when the children were in pre-kindergarten and also when they were in fifth grade to examine how these effects play out later on in the children’s development.