Since depression is an affective disorder whose symptoms include sadness, diminished pleasure in activities, and a certain amount of self-absorption, one might expect that depressed mothers would differ from other women in their display of positive affect and energy with their children. Emotional communication may be particularly central to the development well-being of very young children (24), and many studies have examined the emotional communication between depressed mothers and their infants. These studies typically involve careful and detailed observations of facial expressions and vocalizations from videotapes made of mothers and children in structured settings, including during face-to-face interaction. These reports do, in fact, suggest that depressed mothers have fewer positive exchanges with their infants (25,26,27,28). Their interactions include less talking and play and more silence and social withdrawal (29,30). Similar findings come from studies of older children in which depressed mothers are less warm and positive with their children (31,32,33). In a study of a nationally representative sample, Lyons-Ruth and colleagues (34) examined the impact of maternal depression on whether women engaged in positive routines with their children such as reading books to them or playing with them. For each symptom of depression endorsed, the odds that mothers would engage in such activities decreased substantially.

Not only is parental interactive behavior less positive when women are depressed, but it may be less responsive to their children’s signals and less contingently related to children’s behavior (25,35). A lack of experience with coordinated interactions with their mothers may deprive infants of important opportunities to learn to regulate their own physiologic states and emotions or to develop a sense of efficacy in communication with others.

Although one tends to think of the core feature of depression as reduced positive affect, mood disorder can manifest itself through irritability and displays of
negative affect (36,37). Many studies of mother-child interaction have shown high rates of display of negative affect by depressed mothers (28,38,39). Especially as their children get older, depressed mothers may be more likely to show impatience (40), to criticize their children (16,41,42), and to have flare-ups of anger (31,42,43).

A meta-analysis (44) reviewing approximately 30 studies of maternal depression summarized the results with respect to three categories of parenting behavior: negative, disengaged, positive. The meta-analysis suggested effects of maternal depression on each of these categories of parental behavior. Depression had a small inverse effect on mothers’ display of positive affect. Depression had a larger, moderate effect on mothers’ disengagement from children and negativity.

Some investigators have suggested that there may be two different types of depressed mothers—those who typically are more withdrawn and those who typically are more intrusive (26,45). Withdrawn mothers are affectively disengaged from their infants, verbalizing less, and relatively expressionless in face and voice. Intrusive mothers are overstimulating and interfering, poking and jabbing their babies, talking loudly, and exhibiting annoyance. The developmental course for children of these two parenting experiences could be quite different. One might expect that infants with withdrawn mothers would learn from their mothers a sense of helplessness, ineffectiveness, and passivity in social relationships. Infants of intrusive mothers on the other hand might learn to avoid interaction to protect themselves from intrusion or to protest and fend off their mothers’ unwanted actions by angry displays.

Other investigators have written about ways in which parents combine disengagement and anger into their interactions with their children. Studies of children with behavior problems have shown that they and their parents engage in patterns of “coercive” interactions (46). Coercive interactions begin when parents passively tolerate children’s noncompliance. Children often escalate their negative behavior in efforts to seek parental attention, and parents eventually respond with anger. Thus parents and children get caught up in cycles of interaction in which children escalate their angry displays, and parents vacillate between disengagement and angry outbursts. Studies of depressed mothers suggest patterns of interaction with coercive features. Depressed mothers, when faced with children’s noncompliance, may alternate between dropping their demands or persisting uncompromisingly (47). Depressed mothers of older children and adolescents may be generally lax in monitoring, guiding, and disciplining their children but punctuate their relationship with episodes of anger and harsh punitive discipline (28,33,48,49,50).