STRESSED parents aren’t just damaging their own health – they may also be making their children more vulnerable to illness.
Stress is well known to affect a person’s own physical health, but the effect on their children’s health was unclear. To investigate, Mary Caserta and her colleagues at the University of Rochester in New York asked the parents of 169 children aged between 5 and 10 to monitor their child’s health over three years, recording symptoms of illnesses and taking their temperatures.
Every six months, the parents took a test designed to assess their own psychiatric health, noting markers of stress…
