Depression in adults can negatively impact both those afflicted and those around them. Parental depression is associated with negative developmental outcomes in children. Parenting practices
have been supported as a mechanism in parental depression’s effect on child psychosocial
outcomes, but it is less clear whether the same is true for long-term health outcomes. The current
study examined whether parenting practices, specifically physical and psychologically
aggressive parenting and level of parental engagement, served as a mechanism linking maternal
depression and adolescents’ epigenetic aging, a predictor of long-term health using data from
1,971 mother-child dyads from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing study. Epigenetic
aging was measured using three algorithms: PhenoAge, GrimAge, and Dunedin PACE. Results
indicated that increased maternal physical aggression mediated the effect of maternal depression
on greater changes in accelerated epigenetic age between ages 9 and 15 years when measured
with the GrimAge clock.
