Network structure of depressive symptoms in father–mother–adolescent triads: Do networks differ by age?

Adolescents’ and their parents’ depression influence each other reciprocally. However, the specific mechanisms that contribute to the shared occurrence of depression at the symptom level within families remain unclear. Additionally, these relationships may vary across different stages of adolescent development as depressive symptoms change over time.

This study uses network analysis to examine father‒mother‒adolescent triads, aiming to explore the interconnectedness of depressive symptoms within families and how these connections may differ across various developmental stages. This cross-sectional study included 2,647 father‒mother‒adolescent triads from the China Family Panel Studies in 2016. Network analysis was utilized to identify central and bridge symptoms that connect different communities (i.e., family members) in depressive networks across the early (10–12 years), middle (13–15 years), and late (16–18 years) stages of adolescence.

Parental report of “feeling sad” was central to the network across most stages. Specific symptoms in parents such as “feeling sad” and “inability to get going” bridged different communities. Variations in node strength and connectivity were observed across different stages.

These findings highlight the transactional processes that contribute to the persistence of depression among families across different stages of adolescence. Parental symptoms such as “feeling sad” and “inability to get going” were key symptoms, suggesting potential targets for family-based interventions. Interventions involving both parents and those tailored to adolescents’ developmental stages may enhance treatment effectiveness, although bridge-related findings are exploratory because of limited stability.

Funding informationBrain Science and Brain-like Intelligence Technology - National Science and Technology Major Project 2021ZD0200500. State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China School of Psychology, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China INVEST Flagship, University of Turku, Turku, Finland Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment Toward Basic Education Quality, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China The authors declare no competing interests. The study was approved by the Biomedical Ethics Review Committee of Peking University (IRB00001052-14010).

The present study used anonymized secondary data, and no additional approval was required. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.