Do Parental Psychiatric Symptoms Predict Outcome in Children With Psychiatric Disorders? A Naturalistic Clinical Study

Higher symptom scores at follow-up in children of parents with psychopathology were mainly explained by higher symptom scores at baseline. Continuing parent-offspring associations could be a result of reciprocal effects, ie, parental symptoms influencing offspring symptoms and offspring symptoms influencing parental symptoms. Nevertheless, the results show that these children are at risk for persisting symptoms, possibly indicating the need to treat maternal and paternal psychopathology.