Parents with chronic pain have a higher likelihood of having depression and anxiety and more often have children with these conditions. Depressive and anxious symptoms in children worsen pain-related disability and may be derived from exposure to their parents’ symptoms. We assessed a model of intergenerational chronic pain-related disability that relies upon depressive and anxious symptoms of a mother and their child. Adolescents in grades 5 to 10 from 5 schools, and their mothers, completed standardized electronic questionnaires about pain. In maternal-offspring dyads (n 5 1179), the mean offspring age was 12.7 years (SD 5 1.7, range 5 10-17) and 51% were girls. Logistic regression was used to investigate mother–offspring associations of chronic pain presence, and mediation models using multiple linear regression were used to investigate the proposed model. Adolescents of mothers with chronic pain had 1.67 (95% confidence interval [CI] 5 1.29-2.16) times increased odds of chronic pain, with each year of exposure to maternal chronic pain associated with a 5%(odds ratio 95% CI 5 1.01-1.10) increased likelihood of offspring chronic pain. Worse maternal pain-related disability was associated with worse offspring pain-related disability (b 5 0.20, 95% CI 5 0.06-0.34). The mediation model indicated maternal and adolescent offspring symptoms of depression explained 36% of the relationship between maternal and offspring pain-related disability, with 11% explained by the intergenerational transmission of depression (serial mediation). We conclude that worse pain-related disability is associated between parent and child, and that depressive symptoms common to both mother and child play a key role in this relationship.