Maternal Depression Found to Disrupt Emotional Responsiveness, Infant Care: Daily Dose

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Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.

On July 15, 2025, we reported on a systematic review published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry that was designed to synthesize the evidence on the association between maternal depression and parenting over the past decade.

The study

For their study, researchers included studies from diverse regions, including Europe, Latin America, East Asia, North America, and the Middle East; 8 studies were conducted in middle-income countries and one in a low-income setting. All eligible studies assessed maternal depression diagnosed as major depressive disorder or screened for depressive symptoms during the perinatal period or throughout the child’s youth. Parenting practices—specific behaviors directed toward children such as responsiveness, warmth, and interaction—were the primary focus of analysis; parenting styles, eg, authoritarian, permissive, neglectful, were excluded. The majority of studies focused on children younger than 36 months of age and were conducted in high-income countries using cross-sectional designs.

The findings

Investigators found that 97% (27 out of 29) of observational studies published in the decade between 2013 and 2023, reported that maternal depression negatively affected parenting practices, particularly during a child’s early years.

Across the included studies, maternal depression was associated with poor response to a child's cues and impaired bonding. Fourteen studies directly assessed the mother-infant bond, and all reported that depression was linked to poorer bonding outcomes. In studies using validated instruments such as the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and the Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire, higher depression scores corresponded with greater bonding impairment. Four studies found that mothers without depressive symptoms demonstrated stronger emotional connections with their infants than those with current or past depression. One US-based study involving 36 low-income mother-child dyads did not find a significant association between depression and maternal sensitivity or positive regard, but this was an outlier among the findings.

Authors' comments

"Findings consistently highlight the association between maternal depression and negative parenting practices, influencing sensitivity, affection, attachment, involvement, commitment, responsiveness, and stimulation. Mothers experiencing depression face challenges across these domains, which may affect child development. Future research should explore these associations in diverse sociocultural contexts and include longitudinal studies to better understand long-term effects."

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