A longitudinal study of women in childbirth and their 4-year-old children

Abstract

One hundred and sixty-one randomly selected Norwegian women (participants in a longitudinal family project) were studied during their stay at the birth clinic. They were interviewed the first day after delivery about the childbirth process. They were interviewed the fifth day after delivery about their own emotional status, about their baby and about the hospital's routines. The interviewer (clinical psychologist) made a global rating of each mother's emotional functioning the fifth day postpartum. When the children were 4 years old, 72 of the mothers were interviewed about their own child's development. Results suggest that some of the mother's childbirth experiences (‘dissatisfaction with own coping’ and ‘unmet needs in relation to midwife’) are related to problems in the social-emotional adjustment of their 4-year-old children. Mothers who report themselves as anxious the fifth day postpartum, those who thought it would be difficult to cope with the new situation at home, and those who were assessed by the psychologist as being anxious or depressed, had children with more social-emotional difficulties at 4 years than mothers without these experiences.