Paternal depression, coparenting, and father–infant bonding in Sweden during COVID-19: A national cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Father-infant bonding is a critical component of early child development, influencing children's emotional, cognitive, and social outcomes, but may be disrupted by paternal depression and family dynamics. Replicating a pre-pandemic Stockholm-based study, the current study examines i) the extent to which fathers' depression symptoms and the quality of the coparenting relationship are associated with father-infant bonding and ii) whether these two variables serve as mediators in the relationship with bonding during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. METHODS: This study employed a cross-sectional design using data from a large national cohort in Sweden (n = 1600). We tested two competing mediation models using structural equation modeling in Stata. Fathers' depression symptoms and coparenting relationship were entered as mediators in each of those models, after adjusting for several confounders. RESULTS: Confirming the previous analysis that we replicated, when fathers had higher levels of depression symptoms (Model 1) or lower levels of coparenting (Model 2), fathers reported greater difficulties with infant bonding, including greater impaired bonding, rejection and anger, and anxiety about caregiving, after accounting for covariates. Additionally, the analysis revealed significant indirect associations through coparenting (Model 1) and fathers' depression symptoms (Model 2). CONCLUSIONS: Decreasing fathers' depression symptoms and strengthening coparenting quality can potentially reduce father-infant bonding disturbances. Fathers' depression symptoms and coparenting quality appear bi-directionally linked in their association with father-infant bonding. Early detection and preventive, father-inclusive supports including co-screening and providing support for paternal depression symptoms, the coparenting relationship, and bonding difficulties are warranted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".