According to recent studies, pregnant women may have one less thing to worry about.
In the May/June issue of Child Development, scientists reveal that mild to moderate amounts of psychological stress may slightly help in healthy pregnant women,- and not harm - babies’ development.
"These results do not advocate the concept that maternal anxiety, depression, or nonspecific stress in the course of pregnancy within normal limits poses a considerable hazard to early child development or behavioral regulation," write Janet DiPietro, PhD, and colleagues in the journal.
DiPietro is a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"On the contrary, we discovered modest, although consistent, support that these aspects of maternal psychological functioning are connected with more optimal early child development," the scientists add, pointing out that the benefits to babies were "tiny."
Stressed and Pregnant
The research included ninety four women who took psychological tests in the course of their pregnancy (at 24, 28, or 32 weeks) and again six weeks and two years after giving birth to a baby. The babies born from those pregnancies took developmental and behavioral tests when they were two years old.
The women participating in the tests were at least 20 years old (average age: 32); each of them was pregnant with only one child. Most were white. Those women who encountered pregnancy-related medical problems or complications (such as gestational diabetes or preterm labor) were not included in the research.
DiPietro’s team calls the pregnant women "well-nourished, eventually stable women with wanted pregnancies" who didn’t undergo traumas in the course of pregnancy and did not express clinical levels of anxiety and depression.
The women participated in surveys concerning nervousness, depression, stress unrelated to pregnancy (such as car breakdowns), pregnancy-specific stress (such as making nursery arrangements), and attitudes toward pregnancy.
The scientists predicted that maternal stress in the course of pregnancy would be related to slower child development, since that’s what tests on animals (animals such as rats and monkeys) have revealed. But those predictions appeared not to be true.
Stress and Child Development
Mild to moderate levels of maternal stress in the course of pregnancy weren’t connected with slower child development or behavioral problems. Actually, such stress was associated with slightly better performance on behavioral and motor skills tests taken by the babies at the age of two.
"However, the beneficial results attributable to prenatal psychological factors, when detected, were small, and ranged from only 5.5 per cent to 6.8 per cent of the variance," write the investigators. The "variance," is understood as the gap in the children’s test results.
Children’s hyperactivity was not related to maternal stress in the course of pregnancy.
"Our research results may provide relief to those patients who are concerned about the psychological implications for pregnant women of yet another pregnancy hazard, in this case, causing women to worry about worrying," write DiPietro and his team.
Exception to the Findings
One group of mothers - those who viewed their pregnancies adversely - stood out.
Those women’s babies "presented slower psychomotor development and poorer emotional and attentional regulation in the course of examinations," the scientists write.
The scientists are not able to tell whether those children’s test results were influenced by how the mothers treated those children. "That is, women who consider their pregnancy more adversely may be less probable to interact with their kid in ways that encourage development and socioemotional regulation," write DiPietro and his team.
Certainly, the results do not describe all children or pregnant women. The scientists are not promoting maternal stress or drawing a direct line between maternal stress and kids’ development.
It’s also unclear how modest levels of maternal stress in the course of pregnancy might boost child development.
Perhaps, babies in the womb might get supplementary stimulation as their mothers’ bodies cope with mild to moderate amounts of stress, but too much stimulation may "overwhelm the response capabilities of the fetus," the investigators write.
