Interactive influences of family and school ecologies on the depression status among children in marital immigrant families.
For immigrant children, a poor parent bond plus negative home climate multiplies depression odds seven times—so BCBAs must pair child services with family-climate supports.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lin et al. (2011) gave one-time questionnaires to children from immigrant families and native families. They asked about mood, family warmth, and school support.
The team then looked at which mix of family and school factors pushed depression scores highest.
What they found
One in five immigrant-family children reported depressive feelings. That rate was a little higher than native-family kids.
When an immigrant child felt distant from parents AND the home climate was cold, the chance of depression jumped seven times. Native children with the same mix did not show this spike.
How this fits with other research
Schmengler et al. (2019) extends this picture downward: toddlers of first-generation immigrant mothers already show early neuro-developmental red flags. Together the studies trace a line from early risk to later mood problems in the same population.
Madhesh et al. (2025) seems to disagree. They found that deaf high-schoolers with higher depression scores still had low rates of full disorder. The gap is explained by culture and language: the Saudi deaf students had strong school signing supports, while the immigrant children in Fu-Gong’s study lacked both family and school buffers.
Lee et al. (2021) synthesis backs the main warning: culture shapes how stress is felt and expressed. Screening tools that ignore language or family norms will miss the children Fu-Gong flags.
Why it matters
If you serve immigrant families, screen for both parent-child closeness and overall home climate. When both are weak, loop in family-resource staff early. A seven-fold risk jump is too big to wait.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The incidence of transnational marriage has increased significantly in Taiwan in recent years. Children born in immigrant families are predisposed to acculturation and learning problems. We aimed to determine if the children of marital immigrants are more depressed than children from native families, and examine the individual and joint effects of various factors on their depression risk. A cross-sectional study was performed to investigate the depression status of elementary school children in MiaoLi County, Taiwan. A total of 676 participants, including 157 children from families in which the mother was an immigrant and the father native to Taiwan, were recruited from 29 schools. A modified depression scale "Depression Screen Scale for Children and Adolescents" for domestic school children was used to determine depression status. Data which might relate to depression, including demographic, family and school variables, were collected with a structured questionnaire and analyzed with multivariate and stratification methods. The results show that 20.4% of children from immigrant mother families and 17.1% of children from native families exhibited depressive symptoms. The child-parent relationship, peer relationship and academic performance in school were found by logistic regression to be the main predictors of depression in immigrant family children. With further stratification analysis, synergistic effects in immigrant families were found between child-parent relationship and family climate and between peer relationship and academic performance, raising the risk of depression in children of marital immigrants by 7.26- and 7.71-fold, respectively. This synergistic effect was not observed in native families. This study provides significant evidence of synergistic effects between family variables and school variables which increase, up to more than 7-fold, the risk of depression in children of marital immigrants. The results provide hints to parents and teachers for improving the mental health of children in immigrant families by reducing the occurrence of depression.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.08.009