NEW Parents Connect: Nurturing Emotional Well-being

Understanding and addressing the effects of perinatal stress and parenting

Parents are children’s first and most important influences in life, and sensitive, responsive, consistent parenting supports children’s cognitive, social and emotional development. However, the stress and adversity associated with economic strain can make it challenging for parents to maintain sensitive, responsive relationships with their infants and can interfere with their own emotional well-being. NEW Parents Connect aims to strengthen emotional well-being and effective parenting in new parents experiencing adversity.

NEW Parents Connect includes:

Practical skills for managing the joys and challenges of becoming a parent
Mindfulness-based stress management that can be applied to parenting
Self-care tools that support calm and connected parenting
An opportunity for new parents to connect and to learn together

Click here for Guided Mindfulness & Compassion Practices for Pregnancy & the Postpartum Period

How did this program start?

NEW Parents Connect started as a study called NEW Moms Connect that compared the effects of addressing mothers’ well-being during the perinatal period as well as their parenting behaviors on infants’ neurobiological development. A key goal of this research was to disentangle the effects of prenatal programming of stress, postnatal parent stress and mental health, and sensitive, responsive parenting practices on infant well-being.

Why is this research needed?

Adversity and stress have profound effects on children’s development. They can affect children’s neurobiological systems underlying executive function, emotion regulation, neuroendocrine stress responses, and social-emotional capacities. These effects are evident as early as the first year of life. A number of processes might account for these effects. These include epigenetic or intergenerational transmission of adversity “embodied” in mothers’ neurobiology, prenatal programming of infant stress systems, parent mental health, and parenting practices. One goal of NEW Moms Connect was to disentangle how each of these factors is affecting different aspects of infant self-regulation and well-being.

Our prior research shows that when parents maintain effective parenting despite the presence of economic disadvantage and adversity, young children demonstrate higher levels of social-emotional well-being. Thus, we proposed that supporting maternal well-being and effective parenting during the perinatal period could potentially offset or mitigate the impact of pre- or postnatal stress and adversity on infant development and well-being.

What we studied in NEW Moms Connect

Using an intervention study that addressed stress and parenting challenges that arise in new parents experiencing adversity, this research compared the effects of addressing mothers’ well-being during the perinatal period, as well as their parenting behaviors on infants’ neurobiological development.

The NEW Moms Connect study compared three different programs that addressed a mother’s well-being or parenting during the perinatal period. Each program was six-weeks and delivered in a group format. The three programs included:

Prenatal Well-being: A prenatal childbirth program that incorporated mindfulness-based stress management and self-care practices that support healthy and positive childbirth experiences. This program is adapted from Nancy Bardake’s Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting program.
Postnatal Well-being: A program for new moms that provided mindfulness-based stress management and self-care practices that ease the transition to being a new parent and support positive connections with their babies.
SEACAP- Infant: A program for new moms that provided parenting and mindfulness practices that support sensitive, responsive, consistent parenting and positive parent-infant relationships. This intervention is an adaptation of our original SEACAP program.

What we learned

We anticipated that the three programs may have different effects on a range of infant outcomes. This information will be formative to specifying the effects of prenatal programming, parent stress/mental health, and parenting on different infant neurobiological systems. We found that the prenatal well-being program was related to improved mental health during pregnancy, as well as higher maternal baseline RSA indicating better emotion regulation, lower negative control parenting, and lower infant cortisol levels in the early postpartum period, suggesting potential benefits to the infants. In addition, the postpartum parenting program was related to improved maternal sensitivity and lower anxiety, which might be reflected in significant increases in effortful control in infants at 10–12 months. Additionally, we found that all parents who received one of the interventions demonstrated more scaffolding behaviors when their infants were 4–6 months compared to mothers in the control group.

What Parents Told Us

We conducted qualitative interviews to better understand what parents thought of the program and how we might improve it going forward. We learned that parents would prefer an online option or a combined online & in-person option for the program due to the difficulty of getting out of the house with their newborns. We also heard that the connections made with other parents were a valuable part of the program. One parent said:

Like just being able to talk to other women, in the same situation as I was, and the same experiences. I think that was really a helpful aspect of it and being able to kind of like share the feelings and the emotions and then having people around us to empathize in what we’re going through. It’s really helpful.

Parents also appreciated the program content both for how it supported their own wellbeing and how it supported their relationship with their baby. We heard things like:

This was a very beneficial course. It was extremely interesting and helpful. The best thing I learned was the ability to acknowledge feelings and thoughts and put them aside to focus in the moment and being mindful to work through discomfort or uneasiness. My overall confidence to handle the unknown is better with multiple useful tools and exercises.

I appreciated the skills that we went over that I could directly use with my baby. They helped me be more aware of my baby’s needs.

What’s next

Through NEW Parents Connect, we are testing if an online format of our program will be more easily accessible for new parents, and we are working closely with partners in the community to implement the program within their organizations.

We are also currently evaluating a task-sharing or train-the-trainer model of the programs to promote well-being in new mothers and their infants. Training opportunities are being provided through the REAL Pro program for perinatal professionals to incorporate the program into their work with new parents. By completing this foundational program, professionals have an opportunity to train to deliver CCFW’s prevention programs that promote well-being in perinatal parents and infants (NEW Parents Connect), preschool- and early grade school-age children and their parents (SEACAP), and youth and young adults (Be REAL).

If you are interested in learning more about NEW Parents Connect. Please reach out to Becca Calhoun.

Publications

Garofalo, L. (2022, November). Cumulative Adversity, Mindfulness, and Mental Health in First-time Mothers Experiencing Low Income. In APHA 2022 Annual Meeting and Expo. APHA. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666915323001592

Calhoun, R., Thompson, S. F., Treadway, A., Long, R. B., Shimomaeda, L., Metje, A., … & Lengua, L. J. (2023). Assessing the Feasibility and Acceptability of Pre-and Postnatal Mindfulness-based Programs with Mothers Experiencing Low Income. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 32(10), 3076-3089. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10826-023-02657-2

Lengua, L.J., Thompson, S.F., Calhoun, R. et al. Preliminary Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Perinatal Mindfulness-Based Well-Being and Parenting Programs for Low-Income New Mothers. Mindfulness (2023).

Lengua, L. J., Stavish, C. M., Green, L. M., Shimomaeda, L., Thompson, S. F., Calhoun, R., Moini, N., & Smith, M. R. (2023). Pre-COVID-19 predictors of low-income women’s COVID-19 appraisal, coping, and changes in mental health during the pandemic. Journal of Community Psychology, 1– 19.

Thompson, S.F., Shimomaeda, L., Calhoun, R. et al. Maternal Mental Health and Child Adjustment Problems in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Families Experiencing Economic Disadvantage. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol 50, 695–708 (2022).

This work is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Maritz Family Foundation.