#Match the baby animals to their mothers full#

“The last thing a new mom needs is to head into newborn baby care stressed and exhausted.” In other words, healthy women leading reasonably normal lives can “stop worrying about worrying.” According to DiPietro, the normal stresses of modern life are enough already. Another study showed that the babies’ brain development benefitted from a little prenatal stress, maturing a bit faster, with quicker connectivity among neurons.ĭoes that mean that women should welcome stress in order to boost their fetus’ development?Ībsolutely not. She found that babies whose mothers had mild-to-moderate distress were more advanced in their physical and mental development. After the babies were born, she tested their development at six weeks and then again at the two-year point. Midway through the pregnancies, Pietro measured the level of the mothers’ psychological distress (stress, anxiety, or depression). Pietro and colleagues studied pregnant women who were mentally healthy, well-educated, and had low-risk pregnancies. “The human brain requires sufficient, but not overwhelming, stress to promote optimal neural development both before and after birth,” writes researcher Janet DiPietro of Johns Hopkins University. The Goldilocks principle (called the Yerkes-Dodson law, in psychology) seems to be true in pregnancy, too.

Along the spectrum, there’s a “ just-right” amount of stress that helps us to function optimally in most situations. And too much is not good because it can overwhelm us and contribute to emotional upheaval and physical disease. When it comes to stress, psychologists often affirm the Goldilocks approach: too little is not good, as it makes us passive. In the last 15 years, though, research on human mothers and babies has caught up to show that my mother-in-law was at least partly correct: A pregnant woman’s emotional state-especially her stress, anxiety, and depression-can change her child’s development with long-lasting consequences. Animal studies have shown that maternal stress, especially, can affect offspring-but it’s not been clear exactly how relevant those findings are for humans. Was there a connection between my internal state and the development of the baby growing within me?įolk wisdom and cultural beliefs throughout history have maintained that a woman’s emotions affect the fetus.

Where was there any time for meditative reflection? Still, she planted a thought in my mind, and I began to wonder.

#Match the baby animals to their mothers full#

I had a full time job with a two-hour commute. Thirty years ago, when my Indian mother-in-law first learned that I was pregnant, she had some advice: Eat a lot of ghee (clarified butter), think pleasant thoughts, and gaze upon beauty.Ĭharming, I thought.