London - As if being a mother wasn’t difficult enough: now scientists say that stress is contagious and can be passed from mother to child.
They showed that 12-month-old boys and girls not only pick up that their mother is under pressure, they also start to become anxious themselves.
The researchers said: “Before infants are verbal and able to express themselves fully, we can overlook how exquisitely attuned they are to the emotional tenor of their caregivers.
“Your infant may not be able to tell you that you seem stressed or ask you what is wrong, but our work shows that, as soon as she is in your arms, she is picking up on the bodily responses accompanying your emotional state and immediately begins to feel in her own body your own negative emotion.”
The researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, asked 69 mothers to go into the laboratory with their babies, who were around a year old. The babies were then taken to a playroom, while their mothers made a five-minute speech and then took part in a question and answer session.
Some of the women received encouragement as they spoke, while others were faced with frowns and crossed arms from their audience. A third group made their speech to an empty room.
The women were then reunited with their babies and the children’s heart rate measured.
The women whose speeches had received negative feedback felt more stressed – and their babies picked up on this, with their heart rates speeding up within minutes of sitting on their mother’s lap.
And the more pressured the woman felt, the greater the effect on the child, the journal Psychological Science reports.
Lead researcher Sara Waters said: “Our earliest lessons about how to manage stress and strong negative emotions in our day-to-day lives occur in the parent-child relationship.
“Our research shows that infants ‘catch’ and embody the physiological residue of their mothers’ stressful experiences.”
It is thought the infants may have reacted to a change in their mother’s voice, touch or facial expression. Even the smell of sweat might have an effect. Such research may help shed light on how children are affected by their parents’ health.
The researchers said: “A common question in public health circles is how stress and social environment ‘gets under the skin’ to affect health both at an individual and at a familial level.
“With this admittedly modest study, we show a possible mechanism for how stress is transmitted from parent to child.”
However, stress may not be the only emotion that a child can catch from its mother.
In a remark that offers hope to stressed mothers, researcher Wendy Berry Mendes said: “We are following up with a study in which half the mothers will experience a calm positive start when separated from their child to determine if calmness can be transmitted to babies.”
* Babies are ten times more at risk of burns than older children, says a study. Many are scalded when they reach out an inquisitive hand and accidentally pull hot drinks or food on to themselves.
Researchers found that in children aged under five, 55 percent of scalds were caused by a hot drink in a mug or cup.
Children make up half of all burns and scald cases seen in hospitals, with the potential for lifelong scarring, deformity and even death, the authors say in a report in the Archives Of Diseases In Childhood. - Daily Mail