Do parents know best? Parent-reported vs. child-reported depression symptoms as predictors of future child mood disorder in a high-risk sample

Parents with depression are thought to be unreliable reporters of children's depression symptoms, but findings are contradictory and primarily focus on discrepancies between parent and child reports rather than on the predictive validity of informants. Using a sample of parents with recurrent depression, our analyses utilised data from a prospective high-risk longitudinal study (the Early Prediction of Adolescent Depression study) to investigate whether baseline parental reports of child depression symptoms predicted new onset mood disorder (NOMD) in children.