MUTUAL MOTHER-CHILD INFLUENCES IN FAMILIES WITH AND WITHOUT AFFECTIVE DISORDER

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Processes of mutual interpersonal influence between well and depressed mothers and their 5-year-old children are examined. This is a longitudinal study, following up the sample studied when the children were 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years old (ZOlMH02144). The study is focused on difficulties of depressed mothers in controlling their children, and the development of children's competent interpersonal responses to control. Both issues were investigated in the initial study. Two major research questions are addressed: What is the relation between the mother's psychopathology and the processes of interpersonal influence between mother and child, and what are the developmental changes from the time the child was two to when he/she was five years of age? The focus is also on the children as active agents of influence, their strategies directed to the mothers, and the mothers' responses to children's control. These bilateral influence processes are studied by analyzing every episode of control, initiated either by the mother or by the child, during naturalistic interaction. Toddler-age findings, that daughters of depressed mothers were more noncompliant, were also replicated at 5 years. In contrast to the toddler-age findings, when depressed mothers were less assertive than normal mothers, when children were 5 the depressed mothers showed more directness and assertiveness than the well mothers. From the longitudinal comparisons, it appears that in some respects the depressed mothers failed to make appropriate developmental adaptations to their children's increasing capacities of self-regulation. However, in both groups robust developmental changes in maternal strategies, as well as children's responses, were identified.