09/04/2009

Impact of Maternal Depression

The new Bernard van Leer publication, Family Stress: Safeguarding Young Children's Care Environment elaborates the stresses that impact families and proposes strategies for alleviating these stresses.  In one chapter Theodore Wachs discusses the impact of poverty on mothers and children:

"In both developed and developing countries, chronic poverty is strongly linked to both increased exposure to stressors and to reduced access to resources that could be used to deal with stress....  In both developed and developing countries one of the significant consequences of family poverty is a sharply increased risk of maternal depression....  When mothers are depressed, children are less likely to receive adequate nutrition or preventative health care and are more likely to encounter insensitive, unresponsive, inconsistent, or punitive parenting.  As a result, children of depressed mothers are more likely to have developmental problems such as insecure attachment, altered stress reactivity, social-emotional deficits, and eventual behavioral disorders.  Particularly in low-income countries, lost work capacity and treatment costs resulting from maternal depression can significantly increase families' economic stress.  Depression can also reduce the mother's ability to use existing intervention resources."

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