Background: The current study aimed to test symptom-level associations underlying the concordance of depressive symptoms in father-mother-child triads. We used network analysis to examine central and bridge symptoms in the contemporaneous depressive network of triads and additionally assessed prospective relationships in temporal depressive networks.

Methods: We included 881 father-mother-child triads with children aged 10 to 14 years from the China Family Panel Studies. Depressive symptoms were assessed by the short version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES[sbnd]D) across three different time points from 2012 to 2018. Contemporaneous and temporal networks (2012 → 2016 and 2016 → 2018) were estimated to examine the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between symptoms.

Results: Within the contemporaneous network, “feeling depressed” was the most central symptom. Parental “could not get going” was identified as the bridge symptom across almost all cross-sectional networks. In the temporal network (2012 → 2016), fathers' symptoms were likely to influence mothers' symptoms. Over time (2016 → 2018), offspring symptoms (such as “could not get going”) began to affect their parents. Certain symptoms were more influential than others: for instance, fathers' “could not get going” significantly predicted mothers' “bad life” and feeling that “everything was an effort” in 2016. Fathers' “could not get going” in 2016 significantly predicted children's “bad life” and “lack of happiness” in 2018.

Limitations: A self-reported scale other than clinical diagnosis was used to assess depressive symptoms.

Conclusions: The current study demonstrates that family members mutually influence each other in specific depressive symptoms. Therefore, family-based treatments that combat depression in youth should also involve both parents and target core depressive symptoms to disrupt the cycle of depression within the family context.