From prenatal anxiety to parenting stress: a longitudinal study.

The objective of this study was to explore how maternal mood during pregnancy, i.e., general anxiety, pregnancy-specific anxiety, and depression predicted parenting stress 3 months after giving birth, thereby shaping the child's early postnatal environmental circumstances. To this end, data were used from 1073 women participating in the Dutch longitudinal cohort Generations2, which studies first-time pregnant mothers during pregnancy and across the transition to parenthood. Women filled out the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Pregnancy-Related Anxiety Questionnaire-revised (PRAQ-R), and Beck Depression Index (BDI) three times during pregnancy: at 12, 22, and 32 weeks gestational age. Three months postpartum, a parenting stress questionnaire was filled out yielding seven different parenting constructs. Latent scores were computed for each of the repeatedly measured maternal mood variables with Mplus and parenting stress constructs were simultaneously regressed on these latent scores. Results showed that trait anxiety and pregnancy-specific anxiety were uniquely related to almost all parenting stress constructs, taking depression into account. Early prevention and intervention to reduce maternal anxiety in pregnancy could hold the key for a more advantageous trajectory of early postnatal parenting.

The interrelationship between pregnancy-specific anxiety and general anxiety across pregnancy: a longitudinal study.

BACKGROUND: High levels of prenatal maternal anxiety - either pregnancy-specific anxiety or general anxiety - may have detrimental effects on both the mother and her child. It is currently unknown how these two different expressions of anxiety influence each other over time during pregnancy. AIMS: This study aimed to describe the relationship between state, trait and pregnancy-specific anxiety levels across pregnancy. METHODS: Longitudinal data from three data-waves of a large-scaled sample of nulliparous normal risk pregnant women were used to display associations over time by means of autoregressive and cross-lagged panel models. RESULTS: Cross-lagged, cross-time pathways from pregnancy-specific anxiety to state as well as trait anxiety were positively significant, while vice versa the most consistent links were found from trait anxiety to pregnancy-specific anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that pregnancy-specific anxiety and general anxiety appear to influence each other over time, resulting in heightened anxiety for some soon-to-be mothers.