For most mothers pregnancy raises the stakes, and the excitement. Her life takes on an intensity. Demands mount. And so do worries, especially if she’s short on funds or family or good fortune. What’s a poor mother to do? If her life was a bundle of stress before, now it’s double her trouble. Then she hears it can be bad for the baby if the mom is stressed out—low birth weights, early labor, fussy babies, slow to develop. Now what’s she supposed to do—quit her job, start a Mediterranean diet, move to the mountains, avoid watching the news, meditate every day? Dream on. As mothers have always done, she does what she can to get by and takes the trouble as it comes.
Listen to this blog on SoundCloud.
Or, maybe not. We’re now starting to see promising reports on what mothers can do that might buffer themselves and maybe their babies against these effects of toxic stress. It’s one thing to study what helps healthy soccer moms do better, but it’s a marvel when anyone can show us how low income, high stress, overweight minority moms can do better for their babies.
This month from the University of San Francisco’s Weill Institute for Neurosciences comes a report from a group that has been studying stress in pregnancy for over a decade. Their first hurdle required showing that they could train a group of over 200 low income, high stress, pregnant women to practice a form of meditation with enough frequency and duration to reduce their stress levels and symptoms of anxiety or depression. Early in their pregnancies these women spent eight weeks in two-hour sessions learning mindfulness meditation habits, and then meditating daily for the rest of the pregnancy. Three years ago this research team published their findings, showing that, in spite of exposure to persistent high stress, these women who got the Mindful Moms Training could improve their resilience during pregnancy, their ability to bounce back under the challenges of daily life.
The next hurdle for the research team required finding out what effect, if any, this new skill for the pregnant mothers had on their babies’ ability to handle stress. I call this research a marvel because it’s hard enough to recruit anyone to participate in clinical trials these days, but it’s doubly hard to recruit pregnant women. And then to recruit their babies as well! This group of 135 women who agreed to the study of their babies were 40% Hispanic, 36% Black, with a median income of $18,000 a year. Imagine trying to keep any young mother interested in this study long enough to participate in evaluations when her baby is six months old, over a year after she first enrolled in the study.
How do you test a six-month old baby’s ability to handle stress? The standard in the field of infant behavior research is a procedure called the “still face,” invented by T Barry Brazelton and first published in 1978. The mother plays with her baby for two minutes, then for the next two minutes she keeps a neutral, still face with no interaction, followed by “reunion” or usual play. Infants are consistently challenged by their mother’s sudden still face—the stressful event—and then they’re relieved by the resumption of her normal face and play. Mothers also find it challenging to keep a “still face” and resist the entreaties of their infant for the two seemingly long minutes.
This recent study monitored the baby’s autonomic nervous system during this still face challenge and recorded the baby’s behavior on video. Compared to infants whose mothers got the usual prenatal care, the infants of mothers who got the Mindful Moms Training showed more rapid recovery in their stress responses and better self-regulation of their behavior. In other words, the babies of the Mindful Moms bounced back faster.
The message from this study is that a high stress mother may have some choice about how much stress she passes along to her child. Though previous studies based on parent report had found similar differences, this is the first study to verify with video data and autonomic nervous system recordings that the beneficial effects of maternal mindfulness training can be observed in the infants at six months. Who knows how long this benefit lasts? That will have to wait for further study.
And before we can declare them buddha babies, a few more studies as rigorous as this one will have to independently arrive at similar findings. If this proves to be an effect that fades after six months, it may not have a lasting influence on the child’s development. However, if giving each baby this kind of bounce for managing stress before and after birth turns into a developmental advantage, then this Mindful Moms Training for high-risk mothers could have an impact on their children’s health far into adulthood, reducing their risks for stress-related disorders like heart disease, diabetes, and depression. How’s that for a head start?