A meta-analytic examination of sensitive responsiveness as a mediator between depression in mothers and psychopathology in children

ABSTRACT

The current meta-analysis examined the mediating role of sensitive-responsive parenting in the relationship between depression in mothers and internalizing and externalizing behavior in children. A systematic review of the path of maternal sensitive responsiveness to child psychopathology identified eligible studies. Meta-analytic structural equation modelling (MASEM) allowed for the systematic examination of the magnitude of the indirect effect across 68 studies (N = 15,579) for internalizing and 92 studies (N = 26,218) for externalizing psychopathology. The synthesized sample included predominantly White, English-speaking children (age range = 1 to 205 months; M_age = 66 months; 47% female) from Western, industrialized countries. The indirect pathway was small in magnitude and similar for externalizing (b = .02) and internalizing psychopathology (b = .01). Moderator analyses found that the indirect pathway for externalizing problems was stronger when mother-child interactions were observed during naturalistic and free-play tasks rather than structured tasks. Other tested moderators were not significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Mediation
• meta-analysis
• maternal depression
• sensitive responsive parenting
• child psychopathology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2024.2359689

Data availability statement

The data and code necessary to reproduce the analyses presented here and materials necessary to attempt to replicate the findings are available from the first author.

Additional information

Funding

SB was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Doctoral Fellowship. AAD is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, SM received research support from the Canada Research Chairs Program. Funding sources had no role in publication-related decisions.