Paternal Mental Health and Child Development Across Multiple Domains

The systematic review and meta-analysis by Le Bas and colleagues¹ provides a comprehensive synthesis of the association between paternal perinatal mental distress (depression, anxiety, mixed depression and anxiety, stress) and poorer child developmental outcomes in studies from around the globe. The authors should be commended for this ambitious project that included identifying 8023 studies, examining 777 full text articles, and selecting 84 studies with a total of 674 effects sizes. They further reduced publication bias by contacting authors of studies that met criteria but did not report outcomes of interest, which resulted in 244 additional effects identified. This study also stratified outcomes for different types of mental distress, developmental outcome, timing of assessment, and offspring age group. Their conclusions are clear: the association between paternal mental illness and poorer child development was robust for mental distress type (anxiety, depression, and stress), developmental outcome (global, socioemotional, cognitive, language), timing (antenatal vs postnatal), and child age.