Do the Temperamental Characteristics of Both Mother and Child Influence the Well-Being of Adopted and Non-Adopted Children?

(1) Background: For decades, the temperaments of infants and small children have been a focus of studies in human development and been seen as a potential contributor to children's developmental patterns. However, less is known about the interplay between the temperamental characteristics of mothers and their children in the context of explaining variations in developmental outcomes. The aim of our study was to explore the associations-with or without genetic links-of the temperaments and psychological distress of mothers and the temperaments of children with behavioral problems in a group of internationally adopted children and their adoptive mothers and in a group of non-adopted children and their mothers.

The effects of maternal depression on their perception of emotional and behavioral problems of their internationally adopted children.

Background: Even though child psychopathology assessment guidelines emphasize comprehensive multi-method, multimodal, and multi-informant methodologies, maternal-report symptom-rating scales often serve as the predominant source of information. Research has shown that parental mood symptomatology affects their reports of their offspring's psychopathology. For example, the depression-distortion hypothesis suggests that maternal depression promotes a negative bias in mothers' perceptions of their children's behavioral and emotional problems.

Parental depressive symptoms as a risk factor for child depressive symptoms; testing the social mediators in internationally adopted children.

Parental depressive symptoms have shown to be associated with offspring depression but much of the research has been focused on maternal depression. The aim of our study was to investigate the extent to which depressive symptoms of both parents associate with offspring depressive symptoms and whether social factors mediate these associations using data from adopted children with no shared genetic background. Data were derived from the Finnish Adoption survey study (a subsample of adopted children aged between 9 and 12 years, n = 548).