The impact of maternal depression on child academic and socioemotional outcomes

•Maternal depression reduces math scores in kindergartners and reading scores in third graders.•Socioemotional outcomes in children are negatively impacted by maternal depression.•As severity of maternal depression increases, so do the negative effects on kindergartners.•Chronic maternal depression leads to larger reductions in reading scores.

This paper examines how maternal depression affects children's test scores and socioemotional outcomes. An empirical challenge surrounding this research is to address the omission of unobserved factors affecting both maternal depression and child outcomes. By implementing bounding, an underutilized estimation technique not previously applied to maternal depression studies, I am able to generate ranges of the causal impact of maternal depression on child test scores and socioemotional outcomes. Primary findings include moderately-sized reductions in children's socioemotional measures and slight reductions in children's test scores when a mother reported any level of depression in single-period analyses, an increase in magnitude of the findings for kindergarten students as severity of depression increased, and larger impacts on reading scores of third graders when their mother was depressed in multiple time periods.