Positive experiences of early motherhood: Predictive variables from a longitudinal study

Abstract

Studies of women's postnatal experiences have tended to emphasize the negative, yet for many women experiences are positive. This paper attempts to redress the balance using data from a large prospective study of childbearing women in south-east England. Questionnaires were completed by 1285 women approximately 6 weeks after delivery. For most, motherhood was a positive experience: for example, two-thirds gave the maximum score of 5 for enjoying looking after the baby and 79% for being proud of being a mother while 72% had no disappointments about motherhood. Preliminary analysis indicated that answers to these questions were related to many of the concurrent measures that might be expected, such as support from partner, EPDS score and tiredness. These were also related to each other. Principal components analysis was therefore used to create a new ‘positive experiences of motherhood’ variable, POSMO and this was then subjected to multiple regression analysis. This showed that 25% of the variance could be accounted for by antenatal variables, particularly by expectations of motherhood assessed at 35 weeks. A further 24% of the variance was accounted for by concurrent variables, of which anxiety was the most important. Perceptions of the baby, tiredness and dysphoria (EPDS score) also made independently significant contributions.