ARTICLES
Early Father Involvement Moderates Biobehavioral Susceptibility to Mental Health Problems in Middle Childhood

https://doi.org/10.1097/01.chi.0000237706.50884.8bGet rights and content

ABSTRACT

Objective

To study how early father involvement and children's biobehavioral sensitivity to social contexts interactively predict mental health symptoms in middle childhood.

Method

Fathers' involvement in infant care and maternal symptoms of depression were prospectively ascertained in a community-based study of child health and development in Madison and Milwaukee, WI. In a subsample of 120 children, behavioral, autonomic, and adrenocortical reactivity to standardized challenges were measured as indicators of biobehavioral sensitivity to social context during a 4-hour home assessment in 1998, when the children were 7 years of age. Mental health symptoms were evaluated at age 9 years using parent, child, and teacher reports.

Results

Early father involvement and children's biobehavioral sensitivity to context significantly and interactively predicted symptom severity. Among children experiencing low father involvement in infancy, behavioral, autonomic, and adrenocortical reactivity became risk factors for later mental health symptoms. The highest symptom severity scores were found for children with high autonomic reactivity that, as infants, had experienced low father involvement and mothers with symptoms of depression.

Conclusions

Among children experiencing minimal paternal caretaking in infancy, heightened biobehavioral sensitivity to social contexts may be an important predisposing factor for the emergence of mental health symptoms in middle childhood. Such predispositions may be exacerbated by the presence of maternal depression. J. Am. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry, 2006;45(12):000-000.

Section snippets

Subjects

A subsample of 120 children and their parents and teachers was recruited from the WSFW in 1998 when children were 7 years of age. The subsample was selected using scores on the MacArthur Health and Behavior Questionnaire-Parent version (HBQ-P; Boyce et al., 2002, Essex et al., 2002a) at 5 years of age to achieve approximately equal representation of children with high and low reported symptoms and, among those high in symptoms, near parity between internalizing or externalizing behavioral

RESULTS

The study subsample comprised 47 boys and 73 girls. Examination of frequency distributions for HR and MAP slope scores indicated group level downregulatory changes over the course of the reactivity protocol and substantial individual variation in both autonomic and adrenocortical reactivity. The standardized score for father involvement ranged from −3.8 to 1.9 SDs from the mean, and maternal symptoms of depression ranged from 0 to 30 on the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale,

DISCUSSION

Efforts to identify and understand risk factors for childhood psychopathology have been impeded by a set of independent but mutually exacerbating methodological constraints. Such constraints have included cross-sectional rather than longitudinal (i.e., developmentally informative) designs (Kraemer et al., 2000), characterization of social environments by single observer reports (Kraemer et al., 2003), unidimensional assessments of biobehavioral reactivity within a single physiological system (

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    This work was supported by grants from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Psychopathology and Development and the National Institute of Mental Health (R01-MH44340, P50-MH53524); additional support was provided by the HealthEmotions Research Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    The paper is dedicated to the memory of our irreplaceable colleagues, Drs. Dan Offord and Richard Harrington.

    The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Professors John Cacioppo, Gary Berntson, Ned Kalin, and Jerome Kagan; David Lozano; and the MacArthur Assessment Battery Working Group (Jennifer Ablow, Abbey Alkon, Jeff Armstrong, W. Thomas Boyce, Marilyn J. Essex, Lauren Goldstein, Helena C. Kraemer, David Kupfer, Jeffrey Measelle, Charles Nelson, Jodi Quas, Nancy Smider, and Laurence Steinberg).

    Disclosure: The authors have no financial relationships to disclose.

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    Copyright © 2006 The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.