Maternity blues
Maternity blues, also known as baby blues and postpartum blues, is a transient condition that 75-80% of mothers could experience shortly after childbirth with a wide variety of symptoms which generally involve mood lability, tearfulness, and some mild anxiety and depressive symptoms. Baby blues is not postpartum depression, unless it is abnormally severe.After the placenta is delivered, the placental "hormone factory" shuts down causing radical changes in hormone levels, and the woman can suffer symptoms due to withdrawal from the high pregnancy levels of estrogen, progesterone and endorphins. Combined with this shift in hormone levels is the physical, mental and emotional exhaustion - as well as sleep deprivation typical of parenting a newborn. All of these factors contribute to the condition.
Childhood trauma
In 2006, a study was published explaining that The effect of maternal PTSD symptoms related to cortisol has been shown to be associated with infant cortisol levels as early as the first year of life, and may be associated with in utero effects of maternal stress Indeed. infants of mothers who developed PTSD in response to direct exposure to the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks showed decreased salivary cortisol levels early in life, compared to infants of WTC-exposed mothers who did not develop PTSD. This effect was most apparent in infants whose mothers were exposed during their third trimester of pregnancy. Their findings suggest that mothers with a greater susceptibility for developing PTSD may produce infants who are more easily distressed by novelty than are infants of mothers who are less prone to develop PTSD. Alternatively, mothers who more readily develop PTSD may perceive and then rate their infants as having generally negative temperaments. This was not the case, however, because these mothers only rated their infants as having greater distress to novelty but not as having other negative temperamental traits. The extent to which the behavioral changes in offspring persist is an important area for future inquiry (Brand, Engel, Canfield, and Yehuda, 2006).