Maternal strongDepressionstrong and Childhood Health Inequalities.pdf

Maternal Depression and Childhood Health Inequalities * Kristin Turney Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Society Scholar University of Michigan November 29, 2010 Word count: 9,688 Number of tables: 5 Running head: Maternal Depression and Childhood Health Inequalities * Direct all correspondence to Kristin Turney, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, 109 Observatory, 3642 SPH Tower, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Turney’s work on this project was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Society Scholars Program. Funding for the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study was provided by NICHD through grants R01HD36916, R01HD39135, and R01HD40421, as well as a consortium of private foundations (see /funders.asp for the complete list) . The author thanks Adrianne Frech and Hedy Lee for their helpful feedback. 1 Maternal Depression and Childhood Health Inequalities An increasing body of literature documents considerable inequalities in the health and wellbeing of young children in the United States, though maternal depression is one important, yet often overlooked, determinant of children’s health. In this paper, I use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,048) and find that maternal depression, particularly depression that is recurrent or chronic, puts children at risk of having unfavorable health when they are five years old. This finding persists despite adjusting for a host of demographic characteristics of the mothers and children and a lagged indicator of children’s health, and is consistent across multiple health outcomes