When one or more parents are depressed in a family, the likelihood that a child will develop depression jumps to 40 to 70 percent. While this does not mean that the child is destined to become depressed if his parent also has the disorder, there is a greater likelihood that this mental illness can be passed on. As learned earlier, depression can be hereditary, and that puts a child with a depressed parent at risk.

Learned Depression

Children are capable of learning and catching our moods. As they experience life events with their parents and observe how they react, they naturally assume that whatever it is the parents are doing must be correct. Although depression can be inherited, children can also learn to become depressed. Unfortunately, not everything you do in response to life's stresses and problems are healthy ways of coping. The more of these maladjusted skills kids learn, the more they are at risk for depression.

If a parent is not taking care of his own depression, a child will often take on the depressed parent's characteristics. For example, if a parent is becoming increasingly negative and hopeless, his child might begin to exhibit the same behaviors. Over time, these characteristics become more ingrained, and the child develops depression. It is harder to treat this kind of depression when these methods of coping have been learned at a very young age. This is another good reason for early intervention and treatment of depression.

Unclear Expectations

When a child has unclear expectations as to how he is supposed to behave or how he is supposed to interact in a family unit, he becomes insecure or uncertain. It's as if the rules change from minute to minute and no one knows how the family is supposed to operate, including the parents. Rules may be made then broken, forgotten, or changed. Trying to dodge the problems caused by such family chaos again puts an extra strain on a child and can cause depression.

Depression's Influence on the Ability to Parent

When a parent is depressed, there is often a decreased ability to take care of a child in the most appropriate manner. For example, if a mother is suffering from depression, she might be so busy focusing on her own problems that her child's needs get neglected or ignored. Most often, this is not something the mother chooses to do, but rather this is a sort of side effect of her own depression.

If you are depressed and are having trouble parenting your child, don't be so hard on yourself. Find several areas that concern you about your abilities at this time and focus only on those. As you begin to feel better, you can improve other areas. Some good parenting is better than none at all.

Unavailability

Depressed parents are often much more isolated and make themselves less available to everyone, including their children. They are less involved in their child's life and activities, and as a result, they are not involved in their child's inner psychological life. Children of this type of parent report feeling incredibly lonely at home.

In these cases, it is not abnormal to see children doing tasks around the house that are normally reserved for adults, such as cooking dinner, doing laundry, and cleaning the house rather than spending their time just being kids. Although there is nothing wrong with children knowing how to do these tasks, parents with depression unknowingly put a child in the position of being the parent.

If this is something you are guilty of doing, encourage your child to participate in more “kid” activities rather than those of an adult. Some tasks can be left undone if it means you have more time with your child. Never has a child said they would prefer a clean house and home-cooked meal to spending time with his parent!

The Child Treating the Parent's Depression

Children have a natural tendency to want to please a parent, so when a parent is depressed, the child wants to make her well. A child will try to make good grades and excel at many activities in order to try to make her mother feel better, even though there is no direct correlation between her activities and her mother's depression.

What the child is trying to do is to decrease her mother's unhappiness. She believes that if she is good enough, her mother's depression will be cured. Of course this is not the case. As she discovers that she really cannot make her mother happy, what often ends up happening is that the child will become depressed, too.