Women who are depressed while pregnant are more likely than others to have kids who are physically aggressive as teenagers.
What wonderful news for parents. A mother is depressed during her pregnancy, and she and the child’s father have 13 years to worry about whether the child she’s carrying will turn out to be a thug as a teenager.
But here at the Tracker, we don’t let sentimental concerns about parents’ worries interfere with our search for the truth. If the bad news is true, we suck it up.
But is it true?
Live Science, by way of msnbc.com, reports the association without qualification in its lede, as I did above.
So does HealthDay, on the BusinessWeek website, with tougher language, saying these kids “are at increased risk for antisocial behavior, including violence.” That makes Live Science’s “physically aggressive” sound positively reassuring.
Most other reports had similarly frightening ledes. And most of the reports came from web-based science and medical news services.
It took most writers a while to get to this pertinent fact: The mothers in this study lived in relatively disadvantaged areas, meaning, as Live Science puts it, that “socioeconomics” could explain some of the rise in aggressive behavior in these kids.
Some of it? How about all of it? How did the researchers determine how much of the increased risk of violence was due to depression during pregnancy, and how much due to living in a rough neighborhood?
Maybe this is what kept the major news organizations away from this story.
The idea that depression during a woman’s pregnancy could affect the behavior of her child more than a decade later is a fascinating and potentially important idea. But we might ask reporters who chose to write this story to do a much better job of explaining why this isn’t a meaningless association.
Grist for the mill: Press release from the Society for Research on Child Development.
– Paul Raeburn
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