The Myth of Normal 118

based on fecal samples taken from newborns days and even months after birth, with a higher incidence of intestinal problems and allergies among these babies.[12] (A deficit in infant gut microbial flora is also seen after many C-sections, when the infant does not travel through the maternal birth canal.) Though a mother’s emotional stress exerts a direct influence on the child’s development and future health, it is not an isolated factor: interpersonal biology holds sway once again. As was the case with Rae and me, there is a complex interplay between a woman’s psychological states and those of the father. A large Swedish survey recently showed that paternal depression in the year from preconception to the end of the second trimester elevated the risk of extreme prematurity (coming between weeks twenty-two and thirtyone of gestation) by nearly 40 percent. This effect was greater, in fact, than that of depression in the mother herself, which raised the risk only of moderate preterm birth (thirty-two weeks or after).[13] “Paternal depression is also known to affect sperm quality, have epigenetic effects on the DNA of the baby, and can also affect placenta function,” one of the researchers pointed out. At first blush, the father’s melancholy posing a greater risk than the mother’s seems an anomaly. As always, context is everything. The social context for procreation in our world assigns women untenably stressful roles in every facet of life, including intimate relationships. Besides being the bearers of children, they’ve generally been expected to assuage the psychoemotional stresses of the men in their lives. Mothering a child may be a mandate from Nature, but mothering a grown man is both unnatural and impossible. No wonder the father’s stress gets outsourced to the mother, at a cost to children and even to the gestating infant. There is a predictable socioeconomic link, too: in a recent Wayne State University study that examined a low-resource, high-stress U.S. urban setting, abnormalities in brain connectivity were identified in scans of yetunborn infants of mothers who reported elevated levels of depression, anxiety, worry, and stress during the last three months.[14] Needless to say, physical factors such as nutrition and air quality interact with socioeconomic status, predisposing children to such problems as depression, anxiety, and