Do depressive symptoms of teachers impair children's learning skills?

Depressive symptoms of teachers at the early head starts might influence their interaction with parents. This could reflect as adverse effects on children's math skills.

The mental health of children directly impacts their education. In addition to this, new research suggests that teachers' mental wellness also plays an essential role in the development of children's learning abilities.

Researchers from the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa, Johns Hopkins University, The Ohio State University, and the Community Action Project (CAP) Tulsa investigated the effects of teachers' depressive symptoms on their students' mathematical skills. They reported their findings in the journal Child development.

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‘Teachers with higher depressive symptoms reported poor family-teacher relationships.’

The researchers used data from FACES 2014, a Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey of 2014. It contains information about the depressive symptoms of teachers and their relationship with students' families.

Other details provided by this survey are about the math skills of students at the head start, learning abilities of children, and co-variates like the income-to-poverty ratio of children's families, child race, time of enrolment.

A total of 1,547 students from 3 to 4 years of age who started their learning at Head Start from fall 2014 through spring 2015 were enrolled in the study. Out of these 1,547 participants, 49% were female. Based on the ethnicity, 27% were white, 24% were black, 41% were Hispanic/Latino, and the remaining 8% belonged to other ethnic groups.

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The study found that,

• Depressive symptoms of teachers impacted children's math learning abilities.

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• Teachers with higher depressive symptoms reported poor family-teacher relationships.

• Lack of positive family–teacher relationships impaired children's approaches to learning.

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"Since we focused on Head Start children from low-income families, our study adds to the existing literature by identifying possible associations between a teacher's mental wellbeing and children's academic achievement that function via the quality of the teacher-parent relationship," said Lieny Jeon, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.

The authors added that their findings do not show any causal relationships and emphasized the need for future studies to explore these areas further.

Source-Medindia