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More than one in five adults in the U.S. experience mental illness each year, according to data from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And more than one in seven young people ages 6–17 experience a mental health disorder, with 50% of all lifetime mental illness beginning by age 14 and 75% by age 24.

Psychologists have long maintained that how parents raise their children during their early years has a major impact on their mental health and happiness as they grow up. Something as simple as praising or scolding a child can be deeply internalized and could determine whether that child struggles with depression, anxiety or substance use as a teenager or young adult.

But how and where the connection is made between parenting behaviors and future susceptibility to a mental health disorder is harder to discern. Notre Dame psychologist Kaylin Hill has devoted the past 15 years of her career to better understanding emotions and depression—and how to break the cycle of intergenerational mental health issues.

Hill, an assistant professor in Notre Dame's Department of Psychology, has found that parents' child-rearing methods during the preschool years coincide with how their child experiences joy and satisfaction across adolescence—a period during which the risk for mental health issues is at its highest.

"In this project, we demonstrate that early parenting is associated with one of the largest neural indicators of risk for mental health concerns we know of to date," said Hill, a clinical psychologist and faculty affiliate with Notre Dame's Shaw Center for Children and Families and Eck Institute for Global Health.

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