Mothers’ perceptions of their 6-week-old babies: relationships with antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal factors

As part of a prospective study of mothers’ expectations and experiences of childbirth using postal questionnaires, an adjective checklist was employed as a means of eliciting mothers’ descriptions of their babies at 6 weeks of age. Associations between descriptions of the baby and antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal factors were investigated in a sample of 710 women. The measure derived from the checklist had considerable face validity, being closely related to the perception of the baby as a social person and as knowing the mother. Mothers who were finding life disorganised and those with low emotional well-being were most negative about their babies. One of the major factors associated with the way the baby was described was parity, with first-time mothers being much more negative than those who had had a baby before. Breast-feeding was also associated with negative descriptions, with women who had given up breast-feeding by 6 weeks after the birth giving the most negative descriptions