Maternal Stress: The First 14 Months Postpartum

SYNOPSIS

Objective. Maternal stress is a psychological response to the demands of motherhood. A high level of maternal stress is a risk factor for maternal mental health problems, including depression and anxiety, as well as adverse infant socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. Yet, levels of maternal stress (i.e., levels of stress related to parenting) among low-risk samples are rarely studied longitudinally, particularly in the first year after birth. Design. We measured maternal stress in an ethnically diverse sample of low-risk, healthy U.S. mothers of healthy infants (N = 143) living in South Florida across six time points between 2 weeks and 14 months postpartum using the Parenting Stress Index-Short Form, capturing stress related to the mother, mother-infant interactions, and the infant. Results. Maternal distress increased as infants aged for mothers with more than one child, but not for first-time mothers whose distress levels remained low and stable across this period. Stress related to mother-infant dysfunctional interactions lessened over the first 8 months. Mothers’ stress about their infants’ difficulties decreased from 2 weeks to 6 months, and subsequently increased from 6 to 14 months. Conclusions. Our findings suggest that maternal stress is dynamic across the first year after birth. The current study adds to our understanding of typical developmental patterns in early motherhood and identifies potential domains and time points as targets for future interventions.

AFFILIATIONS AND ADDRESSES

Sarah E. Maylott, Duke University, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Durham, NC 27712. E-mail: [email protected]. Zabin Patel-Syed is at Northwestern University, Tiffany S. Leung and Elizabeth A. Simpson are at the University of Miami, and Mendel Lebowitz is at Emory University.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of Interest Disclosures

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Principles

The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data. The University of Miami Institutional Review Board approved this study.

Funding

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award [1653737] to EAS and an Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship Sabbatical Award to EAS.

Role of the Funders/Sponsors

None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgments

We thank the families who participated and the undergraduate researchers in the Social Cognition Laboratory at the University of Miami for assistance with data collection. We are especially grateful to Roberto Lazo, for his assistance with participant recruitment and data management.

Data Availability Statement

This dataset is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15295192.2023.2269240.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.