Stress can undermine our best parenting intentions, but new research suggests a way to reduce its impact.
I was looking at Mother’s Day cards recently and found a couple that made me chuckle. One suggested a cape as a gift for a super mom. The other had a presidential seal for the mom-in-chief. Their common theme? The idea that moms need nerves of steel.
Motherhood brings incomparable joys, but without a superpower or the full staff that comes along with the top job of the executive branch, some moments can be overwhelming. Indeed, a recent study of over 260 French mothers found that 20 percent of them reported maternal burn-out.
What helps? You can’t always avoid stress, but a new study by Cynthia Smith and Alise Stephens suggests that cultivating positive emotions may buffer moms from its impact on their parenting.
The study included almost 100 mothers (mostly European American, married, and college-educated) at two time points: once when the children were four to five years old and again four years later when they were eight to nine years old. When children were younger, moms completed questionnaires about their parenting stress and the researchers measured positive emotions as they observed mom and child at play. At both younger and older ages, Smith and Stephens also measured how sensitive moms were to their children—the degree to which moms responded appropriately to their children’s signals—during play.
Here’s what they found: Highly stressed moms of preschoolers were less likely to be sensitive toward their kids four years later—if they also demonstrated lower positive emotions during play. But high positive emotions seemed to mitigate this link: Among happier moms, stress and parental sensitivity were not related. This difference suggests that high positive emotions act as a protective buffer. What’s more, the levels of positive emotions kids showed with their moms were not associated with moms’ parenting sensitivity, which suggests that moms’ feelings were not merely a reflection of their children’s.
Why would this be the case? “Positive emotions allow individuals to build up more resources over time,” write Smith and Stephens. “Despite reported feelings of stress, mothers who were higher in positive [emotions] may have been able to draw on these resource reserves when interacting with their children.”
Many other studies echo this finding. In a recent review of the research, Barbara Fredrickson and Thomas Joiner sum up the science to date: “Momentary experiences of mild, everyday positive emotions broaden people’s awareness in ways that, over time and with frequent recurrence, build consequential personal resources that contribute to their overall emotional and physical well-being.”
Although parenting stress may be ever-present, this research suggests that building up positive emotion reserves helps moms to support their kids without sacrificing their individual well-being. But how can they do that? Here are some suggestions. To read more from MARYAM ABDULLAH, click here.