Growing up in New Zealand is the largest study of child development in this country and both parental and child mental health are research focus areas.

Professor Karen Waldie, a developmental neuropsychologist from the University of Auckland and research lead for the Growing Up in New Zealand Psychology Domain, welcomes the theme of ‘reconnecting’.

“It’s wonderful to see mental health awareness week focusing on reconnecting, particularly after the disruptions to our social networks from COVID-19 restrictions in the past couple of years. Evidence from Growing Up in New Zealand shows that having informal social supports such as family and friends and connections with community, as well as formal supports such as healthcare, are strongly associated with lower risk of depression in mothers. We focus a lot on maternal mental health because supporting pregnant women and mothers of young children can benefit their wellbeing and in turn this is associated with the health of their children,” said Professor Waldie.

Research using Growing Up in New Zealand was published in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health in February this year, and the longitudinal information enabled researchers to look at the mothers’ mental health journey during pregnancy and over the first four-and-half years after birth.

“I hope this week that families and friends will make a special effort to reach out to parents with young babies and offer a helping hand. Communities can support mothers with babies by offering safe places to gather.  Also, if you are a parent take the opportunity to send a message to someone you’d like to reconnect with, or you could try joining a local coffee group or playgroup. If mothers have any worries or concerns please call your GP or Plunket,” said Professor Waldie.

Background for editors:

• Paper published in February 2022 from Growing Up in New Zealand:   Farewell. C., Thayer, Z., Paulson, J., Nicklas, J., Walker, C., Waldie, K., Morton, S. and Leiferman, J.A. (2022). Fostering Resilience Among Mothers Early (FRAME): using growth mixture modelling to identify resources that mitigate perinatal depression. Archive's of Women's mental health. 25:451-461. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-022-01211-1
  
  Findings from the paper:
• Approximately 10 percent of mothers fell into the “high-risk” class defined by mild-to-moderate depressive symptoms during pregnancy and increasing depressive symptomology over time, and most fell into the “low-risk” class defined by no-to-mild depression symptoms during pregnancy and decreasing depressive symptoms over time.
  
• Factors significantly associated with greater odds of being in the “low-risk” class after controlling for socioeconomic factors were:
      Informal social supports
      community belonging
      more positive parenting-related attitudes, and
      better pre-pregnancy self-reported health.
  
• Measures of formal and informal support were derived from a 12-item Sources of Support Scale. The items on the scale are grouped into informal (e.g., partner, family) and formal (e.g family doctor) sources of support, and a 6-point response scale is used to assess the perceived helpfulness; higher scores indicate higher helpfulness.
  
• These findings suggest that targeting internal and external support for individuals across the perinatal and early childhood periods is important to mitigating maternal depression.