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Uncovering Child-to-Parent Depression and Anxiety Transmission: Behavioural, Hormonal and Neural Mechanisms

Objective

The saying “you can only be as happy as your least happy child” reflects an intuitive understanding that children's distress profoundly impacts parents. Alarmingly, ~40% of youth (children and adolescents) experience elevated internalizing (depression/anxiety) symptoms. While research has focused predominantly on parent-to-child symptom transmission, emerging evidence suggests that the opposite direction is also possible. However, no theoretical model explains child-to-parent transmission, limiting our understanding of family mental health dynamics and compromising interventions.
Child2Parent proposes the first model for child-to-parent transmission by focusing on a dyadic biobehavioural mechanism, the coregulation sequence, during which youth with high internalizing symptoms signal distress maladaptively (e.g. hostile support-seeking) and are less responsive to parents’ coregulation attempts, resulting in parents' experience of failure; simultaneously, parent-youth neurobiological synchrony in stress-regulation systems creates a substrate for stress contagion. These behavioural and neurobiological components accumulate over time and increase parent internalizing symptoms.
Using a multimethod approach, I will (1) Experimentally test how youth with high vs. low internalizing symptoms differently impact parents’ immediate hormonal, neural, and behavioural responses through the coregulation sequence. (2) Longitudinally test whether hormonal/neural responses in the lab predict everyday coregulation disruptions, and whether these disruptions accumulate and lead to increases in parents’ internalizing symptoms. (3) Examine whether parents with high (vs. low) internalizing symptoms are more vulnerable to coregulation disruptions.
Child2Parent will open a new perspective to our understanding of mental health in families, and may apply to other disorders (e.g. externalizing), developmental periods (e.g. infancy) and relationships (e.g. romantic couples).

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Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) ERC-2026-STG

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Host institution

BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY
Net EU contribution
€ 1 973 365,00
Address
BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY CAMPUS
52900 Ramat Gan
Israel
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost
€ 1 973 365,00

Beneficiaries (1)