Looking more closely at the data, the authors found that it was the chronic stress in the mother-child relationship and the child-related acute stressors that were the linchpins between child psychopathology and maternal depression. The stress is what fueled the fires between mother and child mental health. Going one step further, the researchers found that youth with a history of more than one diagnosis as well as youth that had externalizing disorders (e.g., conduct disorder) had the highest number of child-related stressors and the highest levels of mother-child stress. Again, all of the findings held up when other potentially stressful variables, such as economic worries and past maternal depression, were controlled for.
