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Abstract
Although nearly two million U.S. women will give birth for the first time during the year 2008, surprisingly little is known about the process by which women prepare psychologically for this life transition or what impact this process has on postpartum outcomes. Understanding how women do and do not prepare psychologically for first-time motherhood should be an important scientific endeavor given the normative nature of this transition and the potential risk that may accrue to mother and child if this process is problematic. This dissertation sought to develop the construct of psychological preparation for motherhood and to investigate its role in predicting postpartum outcomes in first-time mothers, specifically women's mental health as new mothers and their infants' development.
Psychological preparation for motherhood was conceptualized as the process by which a first-time expectant woman begins to form representations of (1) herself as a mother, (2) her unborn child, and (3) her relationship with that child once it is born. It was hypothesized that these three types of representations and, specifically, the degree and flexibility of these representations would differentiate women whose psychological preparation for motherhood was subsequently adaptive and maladaptive. The overarching aim of this work was to test this tripartite conceptualization of psychological preparation for motherhood by investigating the psychometric properties of an interview developed by the author (Transition to Motherhood Interview). The reliability and validity of this instrument, including the relations between preparation variables and other prenatal risk indices, are discussed. Results demonstrated that particular components of women's prenatal representations predicted postpartum outcomes. In particular, the flexibility of a woman's prenatal representation of her infant predicted (1) change in maternal depression across the transition to motherhood and (2) individual differences in infant developmental level at 5 months postpartum. Women who evidenced less flexible prenatal representations of their infants tended to show increases in maternal depression across the transition to motherhood and tended to have infants with lower mental development scores at 5 months postpartum. The implications of these findings for screening and intervention development as well as future directions in psychological preparation research are considered.
