Abstract
Mothers’ experiences during pregnancy have important effects on children’s developmental outcomes. A significant body of literature suggests that effects of the maternal social environment can become biologically embedded to affect the health of her foetus, with mothers’ stress during pregnancy contributing to a range of child outcomes across development. However, some children born to mothers who experienced significant prenatal stress nevertheless thrive. In this chapter we review the protective and promotive factors and processes associated with resilience, particularly those involved in mitigating the impact of prenatal programming of maternal stress. We focus on the social and biological risk factors for experiencing stress and how these experiences appear to impact children’s epigenetic and gene expression pathways, and subsequent emotional and behavioural development. We then review what is known about potential social and biological protective factors and processes related to resilience of children in the pre- and postnatal environment where there has been significant exposure to adversity. Our focus is on social ecological protective factors and processes (the social ecology of resilience) as a framework for understanding how prenatal stress impacts child development.
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Ungar, M., Hadfield, K., Bush, N., Quesnel-Vallée, A., Pekelny, I. (2019). Resilience to Prenatal Stress. In: Taubman – Ben-Ari, O. (eds) Pathways and Barriers to Parenthood. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24864-2_8
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