Anxious mothers make timid babies

Pregnant and stressed to the max? You could be creating a child who's timid, anxious and temperamental.

Visiting Canadian academic Professor Michael Meaney, a researcher into the effects of maternal stress on children's behaviour, says a woman's mental health can be just as important as her physical health in determining how her baby fares.

"For children in general, the level of anxiety of the mother is a very good predictor of the level of timidity and anxiety in the offspring."

Meaney is directing a major study at Montreal's McGill University that follows groups of depressed women through pregnancy and monitors them and their children over the following years.

He says research has shown the repeated or long-term release of stress hormones during pregnancy has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, immune problems and mental illness in offspring.

And it means that babies being born with such problems are often the offspring of parents who are most ill-equipped to cope.

The hormones affect the development of areas of the brain, inhibit growth of the baby and disrupt the blood flow through the placenta.

So how much stress is too much?

"You don't need to start talking about people in war zones or suffering serious mental health problems before you start seeing these effects."

Societies with high rates of poverty and crime were hotbeds for disruption of the baby's growth in the womb and later mental health problems the so-called cycle of abuse was not only the result of learning the behaviour by watching it.

Attention deficit disorders, fear and anxiety, acute shyness, social phobias and schizophrenia could all be linked back to poor foetal development and maternal stress.

Meaney's research will examine whether the consequences of these problems during pregnancy and poor foetal growth can be offset by a good upbringing.

His studies in rats have shown that when exposed to stress, the offspring of mothers who licked their babies more than others were calmer during stress and had a greater capacity to learn than pups reared by low-licking mothers. So a mother's touch may also be a means by which genes involved in shaping our response to stress get turned on or off.

"For some kids, good parents are substantially more important than for others," Meaney says. "When you look at children who are more difficult, for those children parental skills are critical.

"If you have an easygoing, happy baby, these kids are essentially `just add water'.

"The problem is that the population of kids who are temperamentally difficult are born to parents least able to deal with them."

Meaney, in New Zealand as a guest of the Liggins Institute which specialises in perinatal research, is giving a free public lecture, "Happy mothers, healthy children", on August 13 at 6pm at the University of Auckland Business School.