The paper contains a review of international studies of influence of child-parent relations, stressful events in the family, family ideology on development of depression in adulthood, as well as findings of a study of depressive patients which researched the structure, micro- and macrodynamics and ideologies of the parent families of the patients. The findings prove that such families are characterized by either alienation of their members or symbiotic links between them, as well as by denial of open expression of feelings, fostering of negative emotions and mistrust of people, destructive control, high number of stressful events in the family history, family rules and standards bordering on perfectionism. A gap between the images of the ideal and the actual parent is characteristic of all depressive patients.