: Poor parental relationships may increase the severity of mood symptoms in children with bipolar disorder, research suggests.

Lindsay Schenkel and colleagues from the University of Illinois at Chicago write: “Parent-child relationships may have a significant effect on illness characteristics of children with paediatric bipolar disorder, and these relationships may, in turn, be affected by the child's illness.”

To explore this, the team interviewed the families of 30 children with bipolar disorder and those of 30 without the mood disorder.

The participants completed questionnaires designed to assess the quality of their family relationships, and medical records were used to identify information on parental mental health disorders and the severity of mood symptoms in the children.

Analysis revealed that, overall, parent-child relationships in families with bipolar children tended to be less warm, affectionate and intimate, with more arguing and forceful punishment, than parent-child relationships among the other families.

Furthermore, among children with bipolar disorder, greater parent-child relationship difficulties were associated with more severe symptoms of mania, co-occurring attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the presence of a mood disorder in a parent and an earlier age at development of bipolar disorder.

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, Dr Schenkel and team conclude: “These findings have implications for the development of interventions that focus on the quality of parent–child relationships, in addition to symptom management, in the treatment of paediatric bipolar disorder.”