Parental Emotional Expressiveness Affects Primary School Children's Depression: Indirect Pathway via Parent–Child Dyadic Subsystem

Depression, in recent decades, has shown a clear trend to occur at a younger age, emerging as a prevalent mental health concern among primary school children. According to family system theory and social-ecological principles, parent individual factors, as distal factors, are able to influence the depression of child individual through the proximal factor of parent–child dyadic interaction. Within this integrated theory framework, this study aimed to utilize the principle of the actor–partner independence model to investigate the indirect pathway from paternal and maternal positive/negative emotional expressiveness to primary school children's depression via father–child and mother–child closeness/conflict. The study comprised 403 Chinese families, assessed at two separate time points with a 6-month interval. Our results showed that both paternal and maternal positive emotional expressiveness indirectly predicted children's depression through their own conflict with their child, while both parental negative emotional expressiveness indirectly predicted the children's depression through mother–child conflict. This study elucidated two pathways of (a) family distal factors to proximal factors, and subsequently to the child; (b) parent individual factors to the parent–child dyadic interaction, and subsequently to the child individual factors within the family system. Our findings suggest that regulating parental emotional expressiveness and fostering good parent–child relationships represent potential effective strategies for preventing primary school children's depression.