Perceived maternal symptomatology and its influence on newborn’s motor development. Study on non-clinical mother-infant (1-11 months) dyads.

Introduction: Newborn’s first approach to the world takes place in the relationship with his/her mother. He/she builds his/her-own experiences from mother's repertoire of facial expressions, voices, gestures. Contemporarily, the process of becoming mother entails a wide range of changes, which may lead to psychopathology conditions, among which post-partum depression is the most common. This disease is known to negatively influence maternal abilities and produce feelings of greater struggle in caring the infant, sense of guilty and poor self-efficacy. Motor development represents the principal field of observation in helping to infer infant's needs, feelings and intentions. Its investigation may be a powerful means to understand the influence of maternal attitudes (e.g. depressive-symptoms) on infant motor-development. Aims of the study: The main aim of this research was to investigate the characteristics of motor- development in infants aged 1-11 months, and if/how maternal depressive-symptomatology may influence infant's motor-development during his/her first year of life. Material&Methods: Data were collected within the wider Italian-validation-project of the Peabody Developmental Motor Scale-II (PDMS-2). Participants included 123 infants (1-11 months old) with their mothers. Infants were tested with PDMS-2 and mothers’ symptomatology was screened with SCL-90-TR and CES-D. All dyads belong to non-clinical population. We calculated correlational- and regression-analysis between PDMS-2,SCL-90 and CES-D. Results: The best predictor of infants’ motor-performance is the age in months. Perceived maternal somatization negatively predicted infants’ Fine-Motor-scores. On the contrary, positive correlations were found between depressive perceived symptoms, InterpersonalSensitivity, Hostility and Paranoid Ideation and infants Gross- Motor abilities, especially Locomotion. Conclusions: Results suggest that mother's perceived symptoms influence the ability of the infant to move trough the space, while perceived levels of somatization negatively predict his/her fine- motor development. Age-in-months is the most accurate predictor of motor-performance. Further analyses are needed to better understand relationship between maternal-symptomatology and infant motor-skills.