Postpartum Progress

Hospitals Can Participate in Free Distribution of Attachment Toolkits to New Parents

Birdie Meyer, president of PSI, has shared with me information on a cool opportunity for those of you working in or representing hospitals.

I already told you about the new PBS event "This Emotional Life" here.  As part of their nationwide outreach campaign, they have developed a toolkit on attachment.  The goals of the toolkit are to increase awareness among new parents of the importance of early attachment, increase the number of secure attachments, decrease the number and severity of attachment disorders and influence the healthy development of children.  Among other things, the toolkit will include information about perinatal mood and anxiety disorders that was provided by PSI (click the above link get a preview of the toolkit).  This toolkit will be given to new parents before they leave the hospital.

The producers are looking for ten hospitals to serve as locations for the pilot distribution of the toolkit.  If you are interested and your hospital is chosen as one of the ten, you will receive 100 tookits free of charge to distribute to new parents.  In exchange, you would need to help coordinate with your hospital to:

• Get approval for the distribution of the toolkit from the appropriate departments
• Make sure that all 100 tookits are distributed by a pre-approved deadline
• Encourage the new parents to fill out a short evaluation form included in the toolkit
• Facilitate a short conversation with your staff and the producers at the end of the process so they can get feedback from the hospital on the distribution process
• Agree to speak with other hospitals that might be interested in incorporating the tookit at their own institutions

Birdie has already signed up hew own hospital system (Clarian Health) in Indianapolis to participate.  She is excited to be able to provide additional postpartum and childcare information to new parents in the form of a unique take-home gift.  If you are interested in having your hospital participate, let me know and I'll tell Birdie so that she can connect you with the "This Emotional Life" producers.

C-Section Deliveries May Impact Mother-Infant Bonding

The results of a new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry indicates that mothers who deliver their children via C-section are less responsive to their babies' cries than those who deliver naturally.  The scientists from the Child Study Center at Yale University who conducted the study believe that natural childbirth releases important hormones for the child and mother.  These hormones impact the responsiveness of the maternal brain.   

"As more women opt to wait until they are older to have children, and by association be more likely to have a caesarean section delivery, these results are important because they could provide better understanding of the basic neurophysiology and psychology of parent-infant attachment," said Dr. James Swain, one of the study's authors.

IMPORTANT:  As was noted in the article on this study on WebMD, "Don't panic or think you did the wrong thing by having a C-section because it may be that these differences are just in the initial phases and it may take the oxytocin awhile to build up after a C-section delivery. Or maybe C-section moms may make up for it later with normal cuddling and hugging and nursing," Swain says.

Depression Affects Interaction Between Mom & Baby

According to an article in Medical News Today called "Depression Turns Off The Music in the Mother-Baby Dance,"  depressed moms respond less sensitively and more negatively to their infants: 

As part of a study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Dr. Alison Fleming, together with her student, Andrea Gonzalez, and collaborator, Meir Steiner, played recordings of newborns' cries. Depressed women, she says, showed more anxiety in response to the pain cry than new mothers who aren't depressed.

"We know that, compared to non-depressed mothers, depressed moms respond less sensitively and more negatively to their infants," says Fleming, a researcher from the University of Toronto (Mississauga). "In this case, their anxiety and their negative feelings could affect their ability to soothe their babies and cope with their distress."

Fleming describes the mother-baby relationship as a dance: baby smiles, mom smiles back; baby vocalizes, mom vocalizes back. Depressed mothers, she has found, have more difficulty interacting with their babies - they don't take part in the dance, as it were.

"They may show little positive affect," she says. "Or they may become agitated and overly - but inappropriately - responsive."

Fleming wants to know more about why women with post-partum depression respond so differently to their babies. So for her next research study (also funded by CIHR), she and her colleagues will use functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to see what is happening in the brains of depressed and non-depressed mothers while they look at pictures or hear cries of their babies. A better understanding of how the brain functions in women with postpartum depression could lead to possible interventions, as well as programs to prevent the depression and assist in child development.

I know in my case my son seemed to cry incessantly.  He had colic.  Did I cause the colic by my extreme anxiety, or did the colic give me extreme anxiety?  Did I overreact to his crying?  Was I more stressed out by it than the "normal" mom?  I had such a hard time when he was upset.  I would physically feel like curling up into a ball and hiding in a dark closet.  I felt like I couldn't handle it and had no idea how to help him feel better, and that it was my fault if I couldn't get him to stop.  I'm glad they are doing this research.

Insecure Attachment Style and Colic

According to a Reuters article on May 25, "Postpartum maternal depressive symptoms may be associated with insecure attachment style and infantile colic, according to results of a study published in the May issue of the Archives of Diseases in Childhood."

In a study conducted in Turkey, mothers whose infants had infantile colic had a significantly higher mean Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale score than mothers of infants without colic. (In English, I assume that means they suffered from some level of postpartum mood disorder.)

"A larger number of mothers had insecure attachment style when their infants had infantile colic compared to the mothers whose infants did not have infantile colic ... That finding was statistically significant."

I looked up "insecure attachment style" and found out it refers to "parents of insecure children [who] tend to be less responsive to their children’s signs of distress. These parents are unavailable either physically, psychologically, or emotionally and tend to be insensitive or unpredictable in their response to attachment needs."  I don't know if I met that definition, but I'm sure I wasn't completely available to my son psychologically, and I know that he had terrible problems with colic.

"The authors note that screening, early diagnosis, and treatment of postpartum depression may improve both the mother's and the infant's health. They call for further studies to determine the effect of treatment of maternal depression on the occurrence of infantile colic."

Yet another reason to get treated right way at the first signs of postpartum mood disorder.  What a vicious cycle that PPD may lead to colic, which I can tell you from my own experience can, in turn, worsen PPD.