Parental depression constricts children’s development, but the mechanisms implicated—beyond daily parenting tactics—remain unknown. Today, parents must evaluate and select environmental contexts for child-rearing within increasingly complex residential and educational markets. Depression may hamper parents’ abilities to navigate this terrain, constraining information collection and impairing child-oriented decision-making. In turn, depressed parents’ children may lack access to developmentally enriching neighborhood, school, and child care settings. K–12 school sorting offers a strategic case to assess these expectations, given proliferating nontraditional options and school quality data. Analyses using the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (N = 2,754) linked to administrative data suggest that depressed parents’ children attend magnet, charter, or private schools at lower rates than similarly situated children of nondepressed parents; depression-based disparities appear largest among Latino and Black families. The study motivates future research examining whether the depression-contextual selection link mediates intergenerational processes and exacerbates segregation.

父母的抑郁症会限制孩子的发展，但所涉及的机制——除了日常养育策略之外——仍然未知。如今，在日益复杂的住宅和教育市场中，父母必须评估和选择育儿环境。抑郁症可能会妨碍父母驾驭这一领域的能力，限制信息收集并损害以儿童为导向的决策。反过来，抑郁父母的孩子可能无法进入促进发展的社区、学校和儿童保育场所。鉴于激增的非传统选择和学校质量数据，K-12 学校分类提供了一个评估这些期望的战略案例。使用与行政数据相关的洛杉矶家庭和邻里调查 (N = 2,754) 进行的分析表明，抑郁父母的孩子参加磁铁，特许学校或私立学校的费用低于非抑郁父母的类似情况的孩子；在拉丁裔和黑人家庭中，基于抑郁症的差异似乎最大。该研究激发了未来的研究，以检验抑郁症与情境选择之间的联系是否介导了代际过程并加剧了隔离。