Abstract
Parental stresses are normal responses to raising children. They are affected by stresses parents and children accumulate and bring to their interrelations. Background factors like economic difficulties or the relations between the parents may affect parental stresses as well as demographic and environmental factors like noise and access to urban parks. Most studies on parental stress are based on a verified psychological questionnaire. We suggest using frequency domain heart rate variability index (HRV) to measure parental stress enabling, by thus, the measurement of physiological aspects of stress and risk to health. Parental stress is measured as the difference between HRV accumulated at home while staying with the children and without the husband and HRV measured in the neighborhood while staying without the children and the husband. We use the index to compare differences among Muslim and Jewish mothers in exposure to maternal stress at their homes and to expose the factors that predict differences in maternal stress. We found that Muslim mothers suffer from home-related maternal stress while Jewish mother do not. Number of children and ethnically related environmental aspects predict differences in maternal stress between Muslim and Jewish mothers. Muslims’ lower access to parks stems from lack of home garden and parks in their neighborhoods in the Arab towns but mainly by restrictions on Muslim mothers’ freedom of movement to parks. Despite differences in levels of noise at home and in the status of the mother in the household, these factors did not predict differences in maternal stress. Instead, the study highlights the crucial role of greenery and freedom of movement to parks in moderating home-related maternal stress.
Highlights
This research aims to investigate maternal stress as reflected by the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) using heart rate variability (HRV) in Jewish and Muslim mothers during their stay with their children at home
Comparing the results of HRV while staying with the children at home and those obtained in the neighborhood without the children between Muslim and Jewish mothers reveals a reversed relationship
While the low frequencies (LF)/high frequencies (HF) ratio appears to be increased at home with the children as compared to the neighborhood without the children among Muslims, an increased ratio is obtained in the neighborhood among Jews
Summary
This research aims to investigate maternal stress as reflected by the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) using heart rate variability (HRV) in Jewish and Muslim mothers during their stay with their children at home. HRV is considered a measurement of stress in the short run and as a measurement of risk to health in the longer time. We test whether Muslim and Jewish mothers are exposed to increased risk to health while staying at home with their children. We compare the effects of a set of factors including demographic, socio-cultural, women status in their households and environmental ones on maternal stress at home as related to ethnicity. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 4393; doi:10.3390/ijerph16224393 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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More From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
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