Can Mother–Daughter Communication Buffer Adolescent Risk for Mental Health Problems Associated With Maternal Depressive Symptoms?

Abstract

The current study sought to test whether higher quality mother–daughter communication would buffer associations between maternal depressive symptoms and girls’ internalizing and externalizing psychopathology symptoms among urban African American girls across a 12-month period. One hundred ninety-four treatment-seeking urban African American adolescent girls, ages 12–16, and their mothers participated in the study. Every 6 months (for up to 3 assessments), daughters reported on their internalizing and externalizing symptoms, mothers reported on their depressive symptoms, and both mothers and daughters reported on the quality of their dyadic communication. Daughters additionally reported on the extent to which they felt accepted by their mothers at each assessment. Results of multilevel modeling revealed that quality of communication significantly interacted with maternal depressive symptoms to predict externalizing and internalizing symptoms in daughters, such that the risk associated with maternal depressive symptoms was fully buffered for daughters in high-quality communication dyads. Secondary analyses demonstrated that these patterns of results were not accounted for by higher levels of social status or maternal acceptance. Drawing on a vulnerable and understudied population of urban African American adolescent girls, this work suggests that family communication may contribute to important intergenerational psychopathology transmission processes, above and beyond more general features of the family environment.

Acknowledgments

We thank the mothers and daughters who participated in the study and gratefully acknowledge the administrators and clinical staff at the outpatient mental health clinics who worked with us to identify eligible families.

Notes

¹ Analyses using daughters’ raw internalizing and externalizing symptom counts as outcome variables, rather than T scores, produced similar patterns of results.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH065155).