The trends & factors of Depression Amongst First Time African-American Parents

First, based upon the three assigned scholarly journals, depression was identified as a highly prevalent within the African-American community. The factors that were stated to attribute to these findings are families that fall within the low-income earning bracket, the initial transition to parenthood, living arraignments for toddlers with the first three to four months of life, child rearing, and lowly educated parents found in the African-American community.
Next, low-income earnings and poorly educated parents were found to be contributing factors to depressive symptoms for African-American families. According to Cooper, “traditional sociodemographic risk factoid for depression—having young children, inner city residence, low-income, and low education, for example—are ubiquitous among poor mothers, and depression frequently remains undetected or inadequately treated in this group (Cooper et al, 2003)”.
Additionally, the transition into parenthood is also considered to be a major contributing factor to depression for first time African-American parents. According to Cowan and Cowan, “becoming a parent is considered one of the most demanding and stressful life transitions in an individual will face, often giving rise to symptoms of depression (Cowan & Cowan, 2006)”. This phenomenon is further warranted by The National Institute of Mental Health. According to this institution, “50-80% of women experience postpartum blues, sadness, anger, or anxiety after giving birth that can last for months (National Institute of Mental Health, 2005)”. What is more distressing is the findings of a study conducted by Matthey, Barnett, Ungerer, and Waters. According to their studies, the authors uncovered two startling trends. The first trend was that “physiological distress across the transition to parenthood has the potential to impair the individual while presenting additional risk to the individual’s partner and their relationship, parenting behaviors, and child outcomes”.
Additionally, the same authors also found that preexisting factors are also present for individuals whom find themselves at risk of depression. According to Perren, von Wyl, Burgin, Simoni, & von Klitzing, “among the risk factors for post partum depressive symptoms are preexisting levels of distress, a low level of spousal support (O’hara & Swain, 1996: Simpson, Rhodes, Campbell, Tran & Wilson, 2003), relationship dissatisfaction, infant temperament (Maxted et al., 2005), stressful life events, and personality (i.e. neuroticism; Matthey et al., 2000).