ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief overview of what depression is, why it occurs, and which parents are most vulnerable to experiencing it. It reviews conceptualizations of the mechanisms set in motion by depressive symptoms that may be responsible for its deleterious effects on parenting. The chapter analyzes depression’s relation to parenting deficits linked to specific domains of competence and deficits that cross multiple domains. It addresses the individual and contextual factors that moderate how, and to what extent, depressive symptoms undermine parenting. Emotion-related processes are widely invoked to explain why depressive symptoms undermine parenting competence. Depressive symptomatology is a consistent predictor of low parenting competence, but the size of depression-parenting relations varies widely and on average is modest. In most studies, multiple theories or mechanisms can reasonably explain observed depression-parenting relations. Depressive symptoms appear to bias negatively the depressed parent’s social appraisals and decision making.
