Children's compliance and Parental discipline and control practices in families with normal and clinically depressed mothers are investigated. This study is part of a series of investigations assessing the environmental transmission of competent and disordered patterns of child behavior in families with normal and affectively disturbed parents. Impaired parental skills in managing children's behavior have repeatedly been implicated in the etiology of maladaptive patterns of child behavior, such as noncompliance, aggressiveness, and other antisocial behaviors. Assessments of parent and child behavior are based on detailed observations of parent-child interaction in a naturalistic setting. Measures of parental control include the goals of parental intervention, the quality and timing of mothers' strategies and their ability to resolve conflicts successfully. Measures are also taken of children's compliance and resistance to parental attempts to influence their behavior. Preliminary comparisons between the two diagnostic groups indicated that toddlers of depressed mothers are at greater risk of compliance problems than children of normal mothers. For toddlers of normal mothers there was an increasing trend with age for children to comply with parental requests but not for children of depressed mothers. The data imply that depressed mothers may be relatively ineffective in controlling children's behavior and that this difficulty may increase with age of child.
