A study conducted in Sweden has found a link between depressed parents and their children’s scholastic performance. Unlike former studies into the effects of the depression in parents, which focused on only on the psychological development of child, the new study focused on school performance. The research even suggests depression may run in families.

The research put the depression between a family's economic status, parental education and the factors among many other which influence school performances in children. "We obviously know that depression is a bad thing like any other mental health outcome, it’s less recognized that mental health outcomes affect other people than the people themselves. So for parents or guardians, a vulnerable population would be their children," said senior author Brian Lee, of the Drexel University School of Public Health in Philadelphia. Lee calls the link between school performance and parental depression as moderate.

The study has its finding from a data of more than 1.1 million children born in Sweden between 1984 and 1994. The findings state that 3% of the mothers were suffering from depression while their children were in the last year of school, say at the age of 16, as per Sweden schooling system. A daughter was more likely to get affected than a son if their mother was depressed.

Earlier studies on children with depressed parents had focused just on psychiatric problems such as brain development, behavior and emotions. The research state that the depression measured could be underestimated in this new study and can’t really be called to have affected the school performance.