14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new study conducted by investigators at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), it would appear that mothers who are depressed are more likely to needlessly wake up their infants at night than women who do not suffer from this condition.
The correlation is especially true for women who suffer from advanced symptoms of depression, the team discovered. The reason they wake up their children is excessive worrying, a behavior that is not present in women with lower levels of depression, or who are not depressed at all.
Study researcher Douglas M. Teti says that these mothers tended to want to spend excessive amounts of time with their infants, even at times when the young ones should be resting. During their first years, children need very long sleep hours in order to develop properly.
Teti, who is a Penn State professor of human development, psychology and pediatrics, and also the associate director of the Social Science Research Institute at the university, says that this behavior ultimately led the infants to wake up more often during the night.
“This, in turn, was associated with increased night waking in the infants of depressed mothers, compared to the infants of non-depressed mothers,” the researcher explains.
“Especially interesting about this was that when depressed mothers sought out their infants at night, their infants did not appear to be in need of parental help. They were either sound asleep or perhaps awake, but not distressed,” he goes on to say.
Mothers who displayed little or no signs of depression were found to be highly unlikely to wake up their infants while the latter were sound asleep, or not in need of assistance. What this implies is that depressed mothers are the ones in distress, and not their babies.
Details of this investigation appear in the April 17 issue of the esteemed journal Child Development.
“One has to examine the health of the family system and address the problem at that level. If frequent infant night waking is waking parents up every night and causing parental distress, there are established interventions to help babies learn how to develop self-regulated sleep,” Teti argues.
Therapies aimed at alleviating maternal depressive symptoms, reducing unnecessary worries about infant sleep behavior, and encourage spousal support might prove efficient for curbing this damaging maternal behavior, the Penn State team concludes.