Beyond Perinatal Mood: Breadth of Psychiatric Symptoms and Delay Discounting as Correlates of Mothers' Relational Reports from Pregnancy Through Adult Children

Maternal mental illness affects roughly one in five mothers in the United States, yet most evidence linking it to the mother-child relationship comes from the first postpartum year and relies on self-report measures of depression, anxiety, and stress. In 613 women spanning five family contexts - pregnancy and mothers whose youngest child was aged 0-2, 3-12, 13-17, or 18 and older - we examined twelve psychological constructs as correlates of mothers' relational reports. Eleven were associated with relational reports individually; entered together, only three retained independent associations surviving false discovery rate correction: cross-domain psychiatric symptom burden (beta = 0.38), delay discounting (beta = -0.11), and orienting sensitivity (beta = 0.10). To our knowledge, this is the first peer-reviewed study linking delay discounting to maternal relational reports. Depression, anxiety, anger, perceived stress, and negative affect fell to non-significance, and the symptom composite that displaced them contains none of those domains, indicating that breadth of psychiatric symptoms, not their type, tracked relational reports. A person-centered analysis converged: the latent profile with the poorest relational reports was defined by symptoms across multiple domains rather than by elevated stress alone. Associations varied across family contexts, though because each context used a different relational instrument, differences cannot be attributed to child age. These cross-sectional findings suggest that the psychological dimension most closely tied to maternal relational reports is broader than the perinatal mood constructs around which research and screening are organized, and that cross-domain symptom assessment warrants prospective evaluation as a complement to mood screening.