Individual Mothers Research Articles

Maternal depression and preadolescent symptoms: An examination of dyad-level moderators in an economically impoverished sample.

This cross-sectional study examined behavioral and physiological indicators of the parent-child relationship as moderators of the link between maternal depressive and child psychopathology symptoms. Ninety-seven mothers (M age = 35.38 years) and their 9- to 12-year-old children (M age = 10.32 years, 53.7% girls, 78.1% African American) from economically impoverished backgrounds participated. Mothers reported on their own depressive symptoms using the Beck Depression Inventory-2 (BDI-2) and their child's emotional and behavioral problems using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Physiological activity (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia) of both mother and child was collected during a dyadic conflict discussion task, and interactions were coded independently for mother and child positivity, negativity, and engagement. Physiological synchrony was computed using multilevel modeling, and dyad-level behavioral indicators (i.e., dyadic positivity, negativity, and engagement) were created by averaging individual mother and child behavioral codes. Moderation analyses indicated that the link between mother and child symptoms was exacerbated for dyads who displayed low levels of positivity and low levels of engagement, as well as in the context of positive physiological synchrony. In contrast, high levels of positivity and engagement and negative physiological synchrony buffered the link between symptoms. Findings have implications for conceptual models of intergenerational risk for psychopathology and for clinical prevention and intervention efforts that target the parent-child relationship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Which Individual Characteristics Influence Mothers' Health Information-seeking Behavior?

Which Individual Characteristics Influence Mothers' Health Information-seeking Behavior?

Implicit Maternal Intuition Confidence Is Associated With Maternal Well-Being Across Cultures.

The transition to motherhood involves the experience of each individual mother and child, as well as the burden of cultural expectations. Social desirability demands may impede self reports of difficulties during the transition to motherhood when using traditional explicit measures. One core component of maternal role attainment is a mother’s confidence in her own intuitive knowledge of her child. This brief report presents two studies that examine a “low technology” implicit measure of maternal intuition confidence that is based within a more general decision confidence paradigm. Study 1 examined the association of both implicit and explicit maternal intuition confidence with depressive symptoms, life satisfaction, and maternal identity satisfaction in a United States sample of mothers. The implicit measure contributed to variance in each of the outcome measures, above and beyond an explicit measure. Study 2 explored the association of implicit maternal intuition confidence with life satisfaction and maternal identity satisfaction in Brazil, China, India, the United States and the United Kingdom. Across all samples, implicit maternal intuition confidence was significantly associated with satisfaction with life. However, it was significantly associated with maternal identity satisfaction only in the two individualistic countries (the United States and the United Kingdom), but not in the three collectivist countries.

Cost-effectiveness analysis of antiviral treatment for pregnant women with high viral load to prevent hepatitis B virus vertical transmission.

Vertical transmission of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) is higher in infants born to pregnant women with a higher HBV DNA viral load even if the infants complete both active and passive vaccination. Although antiviral treatment is recommended for pregnant women during the antenatal period to reduce the rate of vertical transmission, most of them decline treatment. A decision tree was made to evaluate the costs and benefits involved when pregnant women either agreed or declined to take antiviral treatment during the antenatal period. The cost-effectiveness price was arrived at by multiplying the reduced vertical transmission rate with expenses of future medical care associated with vertical transmission. From an individual mother's perspective, it was not cost-effective to receive antenatal antiviral treatment given the observed medication price and transmission rate in Singapore. However, the health system asserts that the current price of antiviral treatment is already far below the cost-effectiveness level, even without the Ministry of Health subsidies. Additionally, the awareness and perception of pregnant women also impacted treatment decisions. By analysing the decision-making process, our result explained the current low uptake rates of antenatal antiviral treatment for HBV among pregnant women. We also concluded that from the health system's perspective, it was worth providing subsidies for perinatal antiviral treatment to prevent huge expenses generated in the future by chronic HBV complications.

Predictors of Newborn Screening Utilization in Quezon City, Philippines

AbstractNewborn Screening (NBS) is a Philippine government program based on Republic Act 9288 for identification of neonates with genetic, metabolic, or infectious conditions, requiring provision of NBS to all newborns. Despite its passage, NBS provision is grossly underutilized in 2019. This study aims to identify factors influencing maternal utilization of NBS in two PhilHealth accredited Public tertiary hospitals in Quezon City. A sample of 399 mothers was obtained by multi-stage sampling. Logistic regression revealed that the factors that are associated with significant increase of maternal utilization of NBS were Hospital Offer (p < 0.001; OR = 25.629), PhilHealth membership (p = 0.049; OR = 1.677) and Hospital Location (p = 0.001,OR = 2.365) A direct offer of NBS to individual mothers increased maternal utilization of NBS the most; however, PhilHealth membership and hospital systems also played a large role in patient compliance. It is recommended that hospitals assign specific hospital staff to actively offer and be responsible for newborn screening prior to discharge, and that PhilHealth coverage is ensured for all.

The effects of interaction quality on neural synchrony during mother-child problem solving

Understanding others is fundamental to interpersonal coordination and successful cooperation. One mechanism posited to underlie both effective communication and behavioral coordination is interpersonal neural synchrony. Although presumably foundational for children's social development, research on neural synchrony in naturalistic caregiver-child interactions is lacking. Using dual-functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we examined the effects of interaction quality on neural synchrony during a problem-solving task in 42 dyads of mothers and their preschool children. In a cooperation condition, mothers and children were instructed to solve a tangram puzzle together. In an individual condition, mothers and children performed the same task alone with an opaque screen between them. Wavelet transform coherence (WTC) was used to assess the cross-correlation between the two fNIRS time series. Results revealed increased neural synchrony in bilateral prefrontal cortex and temporo-parietal areas during cooperative as compared to individual problem solving. Higher neural synchrony during cooperation correlated with higher behavioral reciprocity and neural synchrony predicted the dyad's problem-solving success beyond reciprocal behavior between mothers and children. State-like factors, such as maternal stress and child agency during the task, played a bigger role for neural synchronization than trait-like factors, such as child temperament. Our results emphasize neural synchrony as a biomarker for mother-child interaction quality. These findings further highlight the role of state-like factors in interpersonal synchronization processes linked to successful coordination with others and in the long-term might improve the understanding of others.

Neighbourhood tobacco supply and individual maternal smoking during pregnancy: a fixed-effects longitudinal analysis using routine data

BackgroundTobacco policy is increasingly focusing on the ‘tobacco endgame’ which commits to eradicating tobacco use (prevalence below 5%) within the next two decades. Strategies for achieving the endgame are likely...

Trajectories of Aging: How Systems Biology in Yeast Can Illuminate Mechanisms of Personalized Aging.

All organisms age, but the extent to which all organisms age the same way remains a fundamental unanswered question in biology. Across species, it is now clear that at least some aspects of aging are highly conserved and are perhaps universal, but other mechanisms of aging are private to individual species or sets of closely related species. Within the same species, however, it has generally been assumed that the molecular mechanisms of aging are largely invariant from one individual to the next. With the development of new tools for studying aging at the individual cell level in budding yeast, recent data has called this assumption into question. There is emerging evidence that individual yeast mother cells may undergo fundamentally different trajectories of aging. Individual trajectories of aging are difficult to study by traditional population level assays, but through the application of systems biology approaches combined with novel microfluidic technologies, it is now possible to observe and study these phenomena in real time. Understanding the spectrum of mechanisms that determine how different individuals age is a necessary step toward the goal of personalized geroscience, where healthy longevity is optimized for each individual.

Individual differences across caregivers in acoustic implementation of infant-directed and adult-directed speech: Modeling impacts on intelligibility in children with cochlear implants

Caregivers modify their speaking style from adult-directed speech (ADS) to infant-directed speech (IDS) when talking to infants. However, it is unclear how individual caregivers acoustically implement differences between ADS and IDS, and how these differences may affect experienced speech intelligibility by infants, particularly those with cochlear implants (CIs). Seven female talkers spoke fifteen utterances both in IDS and ADS. We analyzed these utterances and their cochlear implant-simulated versions (using 22-channel noise vocoders) to investigate how acoustic distances between ADS and IDS varied across talkers (based on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, MFCCs) and how the effect of these shifts in speaking style on utterance intelligibility were different between talkers (using the acoustic index of speech-to-reverberation modulation energy ratio tailored to CI devices, SRMR-CI). Results showed substantial variability across talkers comparing ADS and IDS for caregivers’ acoustic profiles from MFCCs and for speech intelligibility from SRMR-CI. These findings suggest that acoustic choices by individual mothers may differentially affect recoverability of intelligible words from speech signals by children with CIs, which may contribute to differences in these children’s language outcomes. [Work supported by NIH grant R01DC008581.]

Maud Mannoni and Piera Aulagnier on Mental Illness and Disability: Parents at the Boundary between Society and Childhood (France, 1960–80)

This article reads Maud Mannoni's The Retarded Child and the Mother (1973) and L'éducation impossible (1973) in the context of French ‘institutional analysis’ in order to nuance criticism of Mannoni's work, particularly the criticism that Mannoni blamed mothers for the conditions of their children. Institutional analysis emerged in France after World War II. Institutional analysts drew from psychotherapy, sociology, and education in order to question power dynamics and the consequences of bureaucracy in their areas of research. Although often overlooked, this movement influenced Mannoni just as much as commonly acknowledged influences like Jacques Lacan and the anti-psychiatry movement. Moreover, connecting the preoccupations of institutional analysis with a more Lacanian approach, the thought of the understudied yet brilliant French psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier (1923–90) offers crucial insights into the way political and social structures shape individual psyches. Retrieving these influences, we argue that Mannoni did not blame individual mothers for their children's pathologies. Instead, she identified the social and political dimensions of psychopathologies and suggested tackling the roots of psychic diseases in social institutions.

Short-term rate of milk synthesis and expression interval of preterm mothers

AimTo determine the impact of the pumping regimes of women with preterm infants on the daily milk production, and on the short-term rate of milk synthesis during early lactation to...

Perceptions of Strengths-Based Child Welfare Practices Among Mothers With Drug Use Histories

Families in the child welfare system show especially poor outcomes when a parent has a drug use history. These parents may be difficult to engage, which may contribute to their failure to follow through with service planning and receipt. The child welfare system has historically emphasized risk and pathology and does not always use a strengths-based approach, although this has and can greatly increase client engagement. The current study involves data from mothers of young children receiving child welfare services ( n = 336) to examine individual and family risk factors and mothers’ perceptions of strengths-based practices by their caseworker. Roughly one third of women reported past year drug use. Mothers reporting drug use perceived four dimensions of strengths-based practice lower than mothers with no drug use history. Individual and family risks were associated with lower perceived strengths-based practices among mother who used drugs. Strengths-based practices with mothers with drug use histories are discussed.

Mitochondrial DNA Typing for Forensic Identification

Mitochondrial DNA has more useful genetic information as compared to nucleic DNA because they are present in more number per cell. In decomposed or old biological samples nuclear material in the cell may not exist for a long period, so it is difficult to perform DNA analysis with the nuclear DNA from remains of biological samples. This high copy number in mtDNA increases the possibility of recovering sufficient DNA from compromised samples. For this reason, mtDNA can play an important role in the identification of missing person investigation, in mass disasters and other forensic investigations involving samples with limited biological material. Additionally, mtDNA is maternally inherited. Therefore, barring a mutation, an individual's mother, siblings, as well as all other maternally-related family members will have identical mtDNA sequences. As a result, forensic comparisons can be made using a reference sample from any maternal relative, even if the unknown and reference sample are separated by many generations. Anthropologically, mitochondrial DNA in the fossilised source is used to trace the human ancestry particularly of maternal lineage.

Applying the social–ecological framework to explore bully–victim subgroups in South Korean schools.

Objective: The present study sought to identify the structure of South Korean student bully and victim groups based upon longitudinal data and the association of groups with social- ecological based factors at the individual (age, sex, father and mothers' educational status, household income, aggression, depression, smoking, drinking, type of family structure), family (neglect, abuse), friend-peer (peer relationships, number of delinquent friends), and school (school activity, school rules, teacher relationship) levels. Method: Participants were 2,284 2nd-year middle school students (50.5% male; M age = 14.0 years) who completed the Korea Children and Youth Panel Survey annually for 3 years. Results: Latent class analysis identified victims (4.5%), bullies (2.8%), bully victims (1%), and uninvolved students (91.8%) across time. At the individual level, compared to uninvolved group, bully victims and bullies were more likely to smoke and drink alcohol; all subgroups had higher levels of aggression; and bullies and victims were more likely to have depression. At the friend-peer level, victims reported poorer quality peer relationships, and both bully victims and bullies reported having more delinquent friends. At the school level, victims and bullies reported being less likely to engage in school activities, and bullies and bully victims reported being less likely to follow school rules. Conclusion: Certain social- ecological variables are relevant risk factors associated with each group of adolescents in South Korea. Our findings call for a holistic intervention strategy that addresses not only bullying but also problems such as smoking and drinking and depressive symptomatology.

Eugenics, Epigenetics, and Obesity Predisposition among Mexican Mestizos

ABSTRACTWe compare the discourses on obesity found in early- and mid-twentieth century Mexican public discourse with those of Mexican geneticists and doctors today. We argue that postgenomic shifts towards non-determinism, apparently contained in current openness to epigenetics, need to be considered alongside the persistence of racialized genetic determinisms, and alongside the potential for epigenetic environmental determinisms. By exploring the environmentalist explanations of earlier eugenic thinking about obesity, we trace continuities in the gendered and racialized framings of obesity, which risk stigmatizing indigenous ancestry and attributing blame to individual mothers.

A new dilution-enrichment sample preparation strategy for expanded metabolome monitoring of human breast milk that overcomes the simultaneous presence of low- and high-abundance lipid species

The complex nature of human breast milk (HBM) makes samples difficult to analyze, requiring several extraction techniques and analytical platforms to obtain high metabolome coverage. In this work, we combined liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) and solid-phase extraction (SPE) techniques to prepare HBM samples to overcome the challenge of low- and high-abundance lipid species, enabling the semiquantitative analysis of total HBM lipids in one liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) run. A nonorganic fraction obtained during the LLE step was used to analyze small polar metabolites. This analytical approach allows extensive metabolome coverage, especially for low-abundance glycerophospholipids and sphingolipids. The method was applied to monitor short-term metabolome changes in HBM composition within individual mothers and the results showed variable metabolite composition patterns. Simultaneous detection of high-abundance glycerolipids and low-abundance but not less significant phospholipids in one LC-MS run saves time, decreases cost, and enables comprehensive insight into the dynamics of HBM composition.

Divergent Aging of Isogenic Yeast Cells Revealed through Single-Cell Phenotypic Dynamics

Although genetic mutations that alter organisms' average lifespans have been identified in aging research, our understanding of the dynamic changes during aging remains limited. Here, we integrate single-cell imaging, microfluidics, and computational modeling to investigate phenotypic divergence and cellular heterogeneity during replicative aging of single S.cerevisiae cells. Specifically, we find that isogenic cells diverge early in life toward one of two aging paths, which are characterized by distinct age-associated phenotypes. We captured the dynamics of single cells along the paths with a stochastic discrete-state model, which accurately predicts both the measured heterogeneity and the lifespan of cells on each path within a cell population. Our analysis suggests that genetic and environmental factors influence both a cell's choice of paths and the kinetics of paths themselves. Given that these factors are highly conserved throughout eukaryotes, divergent aging might represent a general scheme in cellular aging of other organisms.

Infant-directed speech enhances recognizability of individual mothers’ voices

Adult speakers commonly alter their voices when talking to infants, giving rise to an infant-directed speech (IDS) style. Here we tested the effects of infant-directed speech on the recognizability of a speaker’s voice. 10 Swiss-German mothers were recorded talking to their infants IDS and talking to an adult experimenter (in adult-directed speech, ADS). We studied the indexical properties using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). By using an unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, the segmental 13-dimensional MFCCs were clustered and reduced to two dimensions using Principal Component Analysis. Results showed that the relative area of IDS occupied in the 13-dimensional space was significantly larger compared to the area occupied by ADS. A supervised language-independent Gaussian Mixture Model revealed that this expansion benefitted the recognizability of mothers’ voices. This means that the higher indexical variability in IDS fosters recognition of individual mothers. Results are consistent with the view that IDS may have evolved in part as a strategy to promote indexical signaling by a mother to her offspring, thereby promoting mother-infant attachment and fostering offspring survival.

Ontogeny of alkaline phosphatase activity in infant intestines and breast milk

BackgroundNecrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a devastating disease of intestinal inflammation that primarily affects premature infants. A potential risk factor for necrotizing enterocolitis is exposure of the premature neonatal intestine to environmental bacteria and their proinflammatory products such as lipopolysaccharide. The metalloenzyme alkaline phosphatase (ALP) has been shown to reduce lipopolysaccharide-mediated inflammation. Additionally, premature rat pups have reduced alkaline phosphatase activity and expression as compared to full term pups. To explore the possibility that the human premature neonatal intestine has a paucity of alkaline phosphatase activity, we measured endogenously produced intestinal alkaline phosphatase activity in meconium as a function of gestational age. To test whether breast milk could serve as a source of exogenous alkaline phosphatase to the neonatal intestine through ingestion, we measured alkaline phosphatase activity in breast milk across a range of time points post-birth.MethodsAlkaline phosphatase activity was quantified in 122 meconium samples from infants of gestational ages ranging from 24 to 40 weeks and in 289 breast milk samples collected from 78 individual mothers between days 2–49 post-birth.ResultsWe observed a strong positive correlation between the meconium alkaline phosphatase activity and gestational age, with preterm infants having lower meconium alkaline phosphatase activities than early term or term infants. Breast milk alkaline phosphatase activity was highest in the first week post-birth, with peak alkaline phosphatase activity at day 2 post-birth, followed by relatively low alkaline phosphatase activity in weeks 2–7.ConclusionsOur results are consistent with the two major risk factors for necrotizing enterocolitis development, preterm birth and lack of breast milk feeding, both contributing to a paucity of alkaline phosphatase activity and impaired capacity to detoxify proinflammatory bacterial products such as lipopolysaccharide.

From the Little Wife to the Supermom? Maternographies of Feminism and Mothering in Australia since 1945

100 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Carla Pascoe Leahy From the Little Wife to the Supermom? Maternographies of Feminism and Mothering in Australia since 1945 Men didn’t do anything. . . . The mother did for the child. The father went out to work. . . . I was a very determined, modern woman, but I didn’t mind being the little wife. —Marjorie, 1950s mother1 There were competing narratives. One was a woman’s place is full time mothering in the home. . . . And then there was the feminist movement which said women can do it all. . . . There was level of unreality about both of them. I did feel really conflicted. —Sally, 1970s mother I read a headline today that said I send my kids to childcare and I refuse to feel guilty. . . . I feel the guilt a little bit but not enough to stop me from sending them, and I still know that in the long run . . . it’s far better for me to work and . . . I don’t want to be a stay at home mum for the rest of my life. —Ariana, 2010s mother 1. All interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms. Where permission is granted by the interviewee, interview material is preserved at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. All interviews are in the possession of the author. “Marjorie” was interviewed by the author on June 27, 2014; “Sally” was interviewed by the author on March 8, 2014; “Ariana” was interviewed by the author on April 5, 2017. Carla Pascoe Leahy 101 The daily lives and long-term aspirations of Australian mothers have undergone significant changes over the past seventy years, alongside shifting cultural and personal concepts of mothering, employment, and female identity. At face value, these quotes from three generations of Australian mothers imply a trajectory of shifting understandings of care, work, gender, and subjectivity, with women’s self-identity increasingly associated with paid work outside the home. Each of these women positions herself in relation to the dominant gender culture at the time she experienced matrescence.2 Marjorie, who had her children in the 1950s, characterizes herself as “the little wife” and recalls being contented with her role as a stay-at-home mother. Sally, who became a mother in the late 1970s, remembers wanting to believe that “women can do it all” without sacrificing family or career, but she experienced this radical ideal as conflicted at both a cultural and personal level. Ariana, a twenty-first-century mother, feels ambivalent about sending her children to childcare, but had always assumed that she would combine paid work with mothering . Despite this seemingly linear progression from a female identity centered on mothering to one focused on paid work, I argue that closer attention to these maternal narratives reveals that changing gender discourses were experienced as riven with internal contradictions by individual mothers. Drawing on a new collection of fifty-six oral history interviews co-created with Australian women about their experiences of becoming mothers, I will analyze the ways in which changing cultural understandings of selfhood, work, care, and gender have played out in the lives of mothers from 1945 to the present. When I started this project, I envisaged it partially as a history of my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and my own maternal generations. In this sense, it is a record of the living memory of Australian mothering; an archive of the maternal memories still circulating in contemporary Australia. But it is also a history of Australian mothering before, during, and after the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. The women’s movement initiated fundamental shifts in the ways Australians thought about women’s role in society, 2. Matrescence is a term coined by Dana Raphael to describe the experience of becoming a mother for the first time. See Dana Raphael, “Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, a ‘New/Old’ Rite de Passage,” in Being Female: Reproduction , Power, and Change, ed. Dana Raphael (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975). 102 Carla Pascoe Leahy their relationships to men and children, and their capabilities in relation to paid and unpaid work. My contention is that the women’s liberation movement unsettled and complicated Australian women’s relationships to...