There is substantial evidence from animal and human studies that mother-infant interactions, and the quality of the early life environment, are associated with long-term child outcomes, including mental and physical health and academic achievement. However, what specific aspects of maternal behaviour are important or how to change them through interventions is less clear. Research into the causes and consequences of variations in parenting is important for determining how parenting might be modified to improve long-term health and wellbeing in children.
We propose to include novel measures into the next generation of ALSPAC in order to understand more about how maternal behaviour develops during pregnancy and the impact that it has on the development of the child.
We propose to measure how mothers respond to pictures of baby faces during pregnancy to further understand how women prepare to respond to their babies when they are born. Once the babies are born we propose to use ‘wearable’ cameras in mothers and babies (worn on headbands) to capture naturalistic behaviours. We can then see how mothers reactions in pregnancy relate to how they behaviour after birth. This might help us to understand how to help mothers (who might be struggling, for example depressed mothers) better prepare for motherhood. Finally we plan to measures the child’s ability on a number of important cognitive tasks at age 3 years old, to investigate how different maternal behaviours can promote the development of these skills.