Child Temperament's Negative Impact On Prenatal Development

As society continues on with the bustle of everyday life, stress continues to be a common factor that can negatively impact a person. Oftentimes, many people become sick due to a lagging immune system and must rest their bodies in order to recover. The same is true for a fetus in prenatal development. The mother’s stress levels do impact their child and can even go as far as impacting their child’s temperament. Child temperament is negatively impacted on prenatal stress due to genetic inheritance, high levels of amniotic cortisol, and increased levels in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. When first looking at a child’s emotional development, psychologists often look at the impact of genetic inheritance from the mother to the fetus.
High stress experiences allows for the child to have a low birth weight, due to abnormalities of the placenta in which the fetus did not receive enough nutrients. Having a low birth weight directly correlates to having a lower IQ, hyperactivity, and even inattention (Davis & Sandman, 2006). Psychologists are also finding that there is a more pronounced affect of stress when it occurs earlier in the pregnancy. For example, Davis and Sandman conducted a study about how mothers reacted to the stress of an earthquake. They found that mothers who were exposed in their first trimester delivered their child earlier than those mothers who were exposed in their third trimester. The same can be said for mothers who are put on bed rest in their pregnancy because doctors want to limit stress on the
Psychologists ended up looking at one hundred and nineteen mother-child pairs at the prenatal stage and again at twenty-seven months. All mothers were similar in their stresses, age, and socioeconomic status. Results found that between neonatal from ten weeks to seven months, infants who experienced high levels of stress in the womb had a difficult temperament. Later in life, this difficult temperament developed into anxiety problems and emotional problems. However, psychologists found that daily hassles during prenatal development did not affect temperament between three and eight months. Therefore, mothers who were more stressed negatively impacted their newborns that had a difficult temperament (Gutteling et al., 2004). Having a difficult temperament can caused disorders such as “anxiety, depression, diabetes, alcoholism, smoking, and drug abuse” (Field & Diego, 1191). Severe levels of depression can also impact the development of schizophrenia and autism. Mothers who encountered high stress during pregnancy often delivered children who had low birth weight. Negative results of birth weight have “been related to an increased incidence of cardiovascular and metabolic disorders in later development, including hypertension, coronary heart disease, type two diabetes, insulin resistance, and hyperlipidemia” (Field & Diego,