Infant stress, teen emotionality

An early stressful environment during a baby girl’s first year can be link to altered brain behavior and signs of anxiety in her late teens.

 A study, led by some scientists of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which involved pregnant women in southern Wisconsin, showed that women who reported higher stress levels created a more stressful situation for their baby.

These women reported every stressful situation they were into during the first years of their babies, four and a half years later, daughters whose moms reported higher levels of stress had more of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood. That observation suggests the girls had trouble shutting down a hyperactive stress response. The same effect wasn’t found in boys.

Fourteen years later, effects of that high cortisol also turned up in the daughters’ brains, as brain scans revealed, the behavior of two brain regions involved in regulating emotions (the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala) were out of sync in women who had high cortisol levels as children, and this resulted into a bad reaction when confronting emotional problems and anxiety.

So now it makes sense when old people say that pregnant women don’t have be under pressure otherwise the baby will feel it and based on this study we can now demand to be treated as queens for our baby’s good.