According to a new study, a father’s involvement in parenting an infant has been associated with a lower risk of experiencing paternal depressive symptoms during the first year of the child’s life.
For the uninitiated, the study in question was published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.
The investigators in the larger study conducted home interviews with 881 low-income ethnically and racially diverse fathers from 5 different sites in the US, one month after the birth of a child and controlling for social and demographic variables, they examined the three parenting indicators: father time spent with the infant, parenting self-efficacy and material support for the infant.
In addition to this, they also assessed paternal depressive symptoms at regular intervals (1, 6, and 12 months after birth) using the Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale.
The…