# Distilling the relationship of parental psychiatric illness to offspring productivity and social outcomes: evidence base for preventive strategies

> **NIH NIH R03** · UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR · 2022 · $78,000

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
 It is well established that parents play a critical role in setting the life trajectory of their children: predisposing
their academic and social engagement, and ensuring an environment conducive to healthy development and
goal fulfilment. Skills that will form the basis for social and socioeconomic success (e.g., attention, interpersonal
ability), begin to shape early in life, with familial risk factors - such as low parental income, education, or health
– negatively affecting such skill development. Children who face either more, or more long-term risk, factors are
more likely to experience negative impacts extending from productivity (e.g., educational achievement), to socio-
behavioural functioning (e.g., criminality), and the attendant challenges of each (e.g., reduced employment
stability, impaired physical and mental health, lower life-expectancy)
 Prior research has suggested a particular relationship between parental mental illness and diminished
outcomes across these domains in the next generation. However, the common practice of distinctly
investigating maternal or (less commonly) paternal mental health – as opposed to unified investigation of the
whole family unit - has limited insight into sex-differential effects and precluded investigation of risk dynamics
by parent’s individual (or, where both parents are affected, combined) diagnoses. Further, the relative
importance of parental mental health, as compared to alternative features with known impacts on child health
and life opportunity (e.g., family socioeconomic status, offspring’s own mental health), remains largely
unexplored. This fragmented approach has left, unquantified, the mechanistic role of parental mental health in
cross-generational life outcomes – a point of public health concern given (1) the relationship of these outcomes
(e.g., years of education, employment stability, criminality) to both the quality and duration of life, (2) the high
proportion of Western children living with at least one mentally ill parent (11-18.2%), and (3) the rising rates of
stress, mental illness, and related outcomes (e.g., suicide), among adults in these populations.
 The current project aims to assess the degree to which psychiatric disorders in parents impact key life
outcomes (educational attainment, occupational stability, criminality) in the next generation, via analyses which
allow these relationships to be enumerated and the underlying mechanisms parsed. Our aims – to 1) quantify
the association of parental psychopathology (dual- vs. single-affected families; within vs. cross-disorder
pairings) with offspring outcomes across the life-course; 2) assess the potentially differential effects of specific
disorders on these associations; 3) examine the relationship of genetics and environment to these outcomes;
and 4) disentangle the pathways through which familial environments interplay with offspring characteristics to
impact the associations under study – have been d...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10506724
- **Project number:** 1R03HD109468-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
- **Principal Investigator:** Ashley Nordsletten
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $78,000
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-09-30 → 2024-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10506724

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10506724, Distilling the relationship of parental psychiatric illness to offspring productivity and social outcomes: evidence base for preventive strategies (1R03HD109468-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10506724. Licensed CC0.

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