Postpartum Depression Affects Dads Too

March 14, 2011— -- Depression in new mothers is well recognized -- but new dads get depressed, too, and it can negatively affect parenting, according to a large observational study.

The study, of more than 1,700 fathers of 1-year-olds, found that depression occurred in 7 percent of those dads, and increased the odds of recent spankings nearly four-fold and more than halved the likelihood of the men reading with their child most days of the week, reported Dr. R. Neal Davis and colleagues at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Pediatricians could be in a good position to help, as 77 percent of the depressed dads reported having talked to their child's doctor in the prior year, Davis and co-authors wrote in the April issue of Pediatrics.

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"Pediatric providers should consider screening fathers for depression, discussing specific parenting behaviors (e.g., reading to children and appropriate discipline), and referring for treatment if appropriate," the group recommended in their paper.

American fathers are clearly taking a more active role in parenting -- a role which the American Academy of Pediatrics has encouraged clinicians to support, noted Dr. Craig F. Garfield of Northwestern University in Chicago, and Richard Fletcher, PhD, of the University of Newcastle, Australia, in an accompanying editorial.

As with new moms, fathers appear to be at the greatest risk for depression in the first year after their child's birth -- and can be screened with the same validated tools.

But getting clinicians to "embrace paternal perinatal depression screening with the same vigor" as for maternal screening could be less than straightforward, they predicted.

"The field of pediatrics is now faced with finding ways to support fathers in their parenting role much in the same way we support mothers," Garfield and Fletcher wrote in Pediatrics.

The study included 1,746 fathers of 1-year-olds interviewed through the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a nationally-representative study following a cohort of U.S. children born between 1998 and 2000.