Comfort with Motherhood in Late Pregnancy Facilitates Maternal Role Attainment in Early Postpartum

Abstract

Quality of life, comfort, and wellbeing during pregnancy are essential for every country in the world. Pregnancy is considered a preparation period for becoming a mother. Maternal role development, including confidence and satisfaction as a mother, is important in the transition to motherhood. Negative psychosocial affect, such as increased anxiety and distress, during pregnancy adversely influences the childbirth experience and childcare, which contributes to postpartum depression. However, the impact of positive feelings on the maternal role development remains unclear. Therefore, the study purpose was to clarify the relationship between comfort in late pregnancy and maternal role attainment and childcare during early postpartum. We designed a descriptive, longitudinal, correlational study by using the Prenatal Comfort Scale, the Postpartum Maternal Role Confidence Scale, and the Postpartum Maternal Satisfaction Scale. Among 339 participants who had received care at a university hospital located in Sendai city in Japan, 215 subjects completed the longitudinal study by answering a questionnaire for the respective Scale late in their pregnancy or during early postpartum. The subjects consisted of 114 primipara (32.0 ± 5.4 years) and 101 multipara (33.4 ± 4.9 years). In primipara, comfort with motherhood was significantly correlated with maternal confidence regarding knowledge and childcare skills and maternal satisfaction. In multipara, comfort in late pregnancy was related to maternal confidence and satisfaction. Positive affect was related to maternal confidence and maternal satisfaction in early postpartum. Therefore, a prenatal nursing intervention helps women become more comfortable with impending motherhood, thereby promoting maternal role attainment after delivery.

The role of 4D US in evaluation of fetal movements and facial expressions and their relationship with fetal neurobehaviour

“…Because, according to these authors primiparas had a higher state of relaxation than multiparas this study of facial expressions suggests that that relaxation might promote fetal brain maturation, especially the central dopamine system, which regulates blinking [51].…”

Parenting stress and development of late preterm infants at 4 months corrected age

“…For mothers, higher stress related to parenting competence was correlated with greater risk of delay in personal-social development. A lack of perceived competence would be expected for the first-time parents in our study for numerous reasons, including: (a) feeling that some things were out of their control such as having a late preterm infant in NICU (Song, Kim, & Ahn, 2015): and (b) feeling that their parenting role was not rewarding (Nakamura et al, 2015). For many first-time mothers, becoming a parent decreased their feelings of competence and increased their stress related to managing day-to-day problems and coping with more challenges than they experienced before becoming mothers (De Caroli & Sagone, 2014).…”

Positive Emotion and its Changes during Pregnancy: Adjunct Study of Japan Environment and Children’s Study in Miyagi Prefecture

“…Positive emotion in late pregnancy was associated with less intense depressive symptomatology, less self-perceived stress, more self-reported social support, higher QOL (Bos et al 2013), and a decreased risk of preterm delivery (Pesonen et al 2016). Positive emotion is also associated with having a normal delivery (Hernández-Martínez et al 2011) and the perception of having a less difficult infant, which protected against postpartum depression (Bos et al 2013) and facilitated maternal role attainment in the early postpartum period (Nakamura et al 2015). Thus, while there are no consistent results regarding changes in pregnant women's positive emotion, having positive emotion is associated with positive outcomes of pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum.…”