Some Effects of Maternal Depression on a Baby's Development

The distress that many mothers experience after giving birth, not justified by objective difficulties but usually attributed to excessive tiredness, affects not only the woman but the whole family, and has an impact on the child's psycho-emotional development.

This is a good reason for mothers who are able to recognize their own state to seek help in resolving it as soon as possible, without deluding themselves that the passing of time and the child's growth will be enough to overcome it.

Indeed, the first weeks of life are fundamental to the construction of a person's own psyche, and next to a depressed mother, the baby finds it much harder to lay solid foundations for their inner world, foundations that could otherwise support them throughout life.

A depressed woman experiences a kind of emotional detachment from her child, which does not stop her from attending to him carefully, from taking care of the practical aspects: the baby is fed and looked after, but by someone who performs these tasks in a detached way, with little involvement, without feeling real joy, without positive emotional resonance. The mother takes care of her child because she has to, but she does not experience these gestures with pleasure; on the contrary, she feels «invaded» by the relentless pace imposed on her, and can only wish for this period to end as soon as possible!

The baby perceives their mother's state of mind and reacts to this poor attunement by continually demanding contact and attention through frequent crying, irritability, feeding problems (whether breastfed or bottle-fed), difficulty falling asleep, and repeated night wakings, along with a constant need to be held because they are unable to manage the moments when they are left in the crib.

It is as if the baby, not feeling their mother's emotional presence and unable to internalize it, lived in a state of perpetual tension, needing to constantly seek her out in order to be able to rely on her and relax. This behavior creates a vicious circle, since the more «trapped» the mother feels, the less able she is to be emotionally available to her child.

In the baby, this situation is revealed through a series of «symptoms» that are often misread:

• low muscle tone or extreme stiffening of the body when picked up;
• digestive somatization (colic, frequent regurgitation), respiratory or dermatological symptoms;
• growth difficulties, with a curve below average for their age.