As if you weren’t stressed enough about your pregnancy, a new report says that women who experience stress while pregnant may end up having clumsy kids.
The report comes from Beth Hands, a professor of human movement at the University of Notre Dame Australia, who says the results suggest programs that help reduce maternal stress in pregnancy could improve outcomes for these children.
In the study, doctors asked 2,900 women in Australia twice during their pregnancies – at 18 weeks and 34 weeks — whether they had experienced stress, such as financial problems, the death of a family member or friend, or a separation or divorce.
“It found that stressful events in the latter stage of a woman’s pregnancy may increase the risk of movement and coordination deficits later in the child’s life,” the report says.
“Fast-forward a decade: When these women’s children were 10, 14, and 17 years old, the offspring had their motor development and general coordination—things like hand strength, walking heel-toe, and standing on one foot—tested.
“The more stressful events a mother experienced, the worse the children performed at every age tested.”
However, the head of the developmental and behavioral pediatrics department at a New York hospital told Live Science not to read too much into the findings, because the skills tested for “may not necessarily matter much in life.’
