If a mother experiences hardship during pregnancy, this may cause the newborn child to grow up to be more stressed.
In a new study in the journal “Biology Psychology”, researchers put 198 into highly stressful environments and assessed their bodies’ reaction to the stress. The children who exhibited the highest sensitivity to stress were those whose mothers had experienced hardship from Superstorm Sandy while pregnant.
Conclusions
Anything that affects a mother during pregnancy can have lifelong impacts on the health or personality of her child.
References
Buthmann, J., Finik, J., Ventura, G., Zhang, W., Shereen, A. D., & Nomura, Y. (2019). The children of Superstorm Sandy: maternal prenatal depression blunts offspring electrodermal activity. Biological psychology, 107716.