Maintaining good mental health during pregnancy is essential for child's well-being at school. According to a team of researchers, children of mothers who experienced high level of stress during pregnancy are more likely to be bullied at school than others.
The findings come at a time when about 70 percent of middle and high school students in the country are victims of bullying every year. For proving the link, Professor Dieter Wolke and colleagues looked at 8,829 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Family problems like financial crisis or alcohol/drug abuse were the most important factors behind prenatal stress.
Experiencing severe stress during pregnancy was found to alter the normal stress response system of the developing fetus, affecting children's normal capacity to deal with stress later.
"This is the first study to investigate stress in pregnancy and a child's vulnerability to being bullied. When we are exposed to stress, large quantities of neurohormones are released into the blood stream and in a pregnant woman this can change the developing foetus' own stress response system," Wolke, Professor of Developmental Psychology at University of Warwick, who led the study said in a statement. "Changes in the stress response system can affect behaviour and how children react emotionally to stress such as being picked on by a bully. Children who more easily show a stress reaction such as crying, running away, anxiety are then selected by bullies to home in to."
According to the authors, bullying can lead to mental health problems in children.
"The whole thing becomes a vicious cycle, a child with an altered stress response system is more likely to be bullied, which affects their stress response even further and increases the likelihood of them developing mental health problems in later life," Wolke explained.
The study is published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
