Prenatal Bonding and Child Abuse Potential: Risk and Resilience in Vulnerable, Pregnant Mothers and Fathers

Purpose:  The parent-infant relationship begins during pregnancy and the quality of that relationship is associated with postnatal parenting quality for mothers (Dayton, 2010).  Further, risk factors such as exposure to violence place the mother-infant relationship at risk for adverse outcomes such as harsh and insensitive parenting (Grasso, et. al., 2015).  Much less is known, however, about the influence of risk and resilience factors on the development of the prenatal father-infant relationship and on paternal parenting outcomes.  Social workers who provide services to expectant fathers, therefore, have little evidence to inform their interventions.  The central aim of the current study is to examine risk and resilience factors that contribute to prenatal bonding and child abuse potential for fathers and mothers in a sample of parents exposed to environmental adversity (e.g., violence, poverty).    

Methods:  Data were collected from 102 low-income, urban dwelling, expectant parents.  Both mothers and fathers were interviewed during the third trimester of pregnancy, a time when maternal thoughts and feelings about the baby become increasingly salient (Slade, 2009). Prenatal bonding was measured with the Paternal/Maternal Antenatal Attachment Scale (Condon, 1985).  Child abuse potential was measured with the Brief Child Abuse Potential Inventory (Ondersma, et. al., 2005).  Self-report questionnaires measured exposure to violence, capacity for resilience (e.g., CD-RISK; Connor & Davidson, 2003), and symptoms of psychopathology. 

Results:  Multiple linear regression tested the relationship of parental history of child maltreatment and symptoms of mental illness (composite of depression, anxiety and PTSD symptoms) on prenatal bonding.  The overall model was significant (F (2,87) = 11.29, p < .001); both maltreatment history and symptoms of psychopathology were significant predictors (p<.01).  However, subsequent analyses revealed a different set of findings for mothers versus fathers.  While the overall model for each group continued to reach significance, only symptoms of psychopathology retained significance for mothers (p<.01) and, conversely, only child maltreatment history retained significance for fathers (p<.05).  A similar analytic strategy was employed to test the influence of symptoms of PTSD and the capacity for resilient coping on the potential for child abuse in these parents.  The overall model was significant (F (2,91) = 46.09, p < .001).  In this case, subsequent analyses for mothers versus fathers revealed similar findings for each group; the models retained overall significance and all of the predictors retained significance (p<.05) with the exception of resilience which only reached trend level in the maternal model (p=.08).  

Conclusion:  This study advances knowledge about relationship development during the prenatal period – especially for fathers.  Data reported here suggest that 1) different factors may be associated with positive prenatal bonding in fathers versus mothers, but that 2) associations with child abuse potential are similar in both sexes.  In their work with fathers, social workers are encouraged to attend to fathers’ histories of child maltreatment as a factor that may inhibit the formation of a healthy bond with his unborn baby.  For mothers, in contrast, implications of these data suggest that treatment of symptoms of psychopathology may be critical to support the developing mother-infant relationship.