Depressed Parents Can Result In Depressed Children: How to Break The Negative Cycle

Your day-to-day life may be negatively influencing your children, without you even realizing it. Find out some potential causes to the epidemic that is depression in toddlers, and what you can do to help.

A number of studies and cases surrounding depression in toddlers are surfacing, and these studies are looking for answers.

Where does depression come from?

Why are our toddlers feeling depressed?

What can we do about it?

Questions looking for answers

These sound like simple questions, but mental health issues are never simple – especially when they concern something as important as our children. But what can you do to ensure your child keeps his or her childlike delight, wonder, and enthusiasm?

Every day the issues surrounding mental health become less and less taboo. To be able to ask and talk freely about depression certainly helps those feeling its pangs open up about what’s troubling them.

For toddlers, however, it is a bit different. They may not understand what’s happening inside them, and they – and we – have a harder time trying to pinpoint the causes of their depression.

Where does depression come from?

The medical community didn’t even recognize depression in toddlers until the 1980s, so it is still a relatively new term, however, depression has been studied for decades.

Most experts agree that depression comes from a combination of biological and environmental factors. The biological factors are easier to see. Chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters, which help relay information from nerve cell to nerve cell, stop working properly. This drop in function leads to depression and other mental health issues.

But depression isn’t all biology. The environmental factors are just as important. More importantly, if you aren’t looking for them they are easy to miss.

Why are our toddlers feeling depressed?

Studies suggest negative environments as a cause of depression in children and toddlers. A child who has one depressed parent is 25 percent more likely to feel depressed; a child with two depressed parents has a 75 percent chance of being diagnosed with depression.

Depression is a growing epidemic, and we can see why. We send subconscious cues to our kids all throughout the day, some negative, some positive. When the bad outweighs the good, our children feel threatened, scared, sad, and confused.

Negative Cues:

Not smiling as much as you used to
Fighting with your SO in front of the children
Constantly shifting moods

Lethargic, inattentive parenting

What can we do about it?

It is much easier to define and control depression in adults. Since our toddlers’ depression typically comes from us, we must learn to control our own issues before they become one of their issues.

Start to realize the signs before depression strikes. Living a happy, healthy lifestyle isn’t difficult – it just takes time, dedication, patience, and love. Just like children.

You must love your body, your mind, your children, and their parents: both yourself and the other who helped you bring this gift into the world. There are multiple holistic preventative measures and cures for depression that don’t require big-pharma meds and prescriptions.