Depression and Social Anxiety in Primary School Children in the Context of Cognitive Flexibility of Mothers

Depression and social anxiety are prevalent disorders in children, that are related to cognitive pathology of parents. This research has been conducted with the aim of comparing depression and social anxiety in primary school children of normal mothers with high and low levels of cognitive flexibility. This research was a causal-comparative design study. The population of the research was all the fourth to sixth grade of primary school children of Arak city (and their mothers) in 2016-2017 years. For selecting the research sample, the method of convenience sampling was used. Thus, based on scores of mothers in Cognitive Flexibility Scale, two groups of mothers with high and low levels of cognitive flexibility were selected, and the scores of their children that responsed to Children’s Depression Inventory and Social Anxiety Scale for Children and Adolescents, were compared by Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). This study with research ethics code IR.ARAKMU.REC.1397.298 has been approved by research ethics committee at Arak University of Medical Sciences. The results indicated significant difference in the liner composition of dependent variables of two groups. (wilks, lambda= 0.892, F97,2= 14.474, p< 0.000). Univariate analysis of variance indicated that the children of mothers with low level of cognitive flexibility have more depression and social anxiety compared to children of mothers with high level of cognitive flexibility. In general, cognitive flexibility of mothers is related to depression and social anxiety of children, probably by ability to perceive difficult situations as controllable, perceive alternative explanations of human behaviors and generate alternative solutions to difficult situations of responding to children. Therefore, mothers need to be more educated and refined in their cognitive flexibility so that they can cause more improvement in depression and social anxiety of children.