Fleming – MAVEN

I’m part of a study called the MAVEN: Maternal, Adversity, Vulnerability and Neural Development project. It’s a longitudinal sample. We assess mothers during their early pregnancies and we follow the mothers and their kids up through now six years post natal, post-partum. We’ve been looking at the genetics of mothering in those mothers. We now at six months post-partum we’re looking at how the mothers interact with their babies. So we observe them, we do videotaping of their interactions with their babies. We give them questionnaires, which gives us information on how they feel about mothering and their babies, and we do general coding of their sensitivity, so do they respond contingently? Do they seem to notice what they baby’s doing? Are they inattentive? Are they attentive? So we can get an assessment of how they’re interacting with their babes. We’ve also collected buccal swabs to get some of the genetic information and we’ve been looking at genes that are related to neuro-transmitters in particular which we know are very important for mothering in other species.