What is The Maternal Stress Project? And why now?
pulling on threads, connecting some dots, tackling a beast of a thought-experiment
Stress, as a word, has become embedded in daily conversation. We love this word. We love to blame it for things. We love to advise people on how to ‘reduce stress’. The market loves to sell us products and services purported to eliminate stress from our lives.
I have seen this word used in a million contexts but none feel… actionable.
Addressing stress and stress-related illness is key to improving health. It is a critical piece in solving the maternal health crisis puzzle. As mothers, it has becoming socially acceptable to talk about our stress, our burnout, our mental health as it relates to rearing our young humans in a system that lacks adequate support. Most people (including the medical community) have accepted the links between stress and health. And, yet, the terminology around ’stress’ remains a generic, catch-all that, somehow, means everything and nothing. This conundrum dulls the effectiveness of targeting stress as a path to improve health outcomes.
(Case in point: current stress management recommendations anchor on individual responsibility – often served up as medical advice amounting to “just stress less” as the clinical recommendation for decreasing the risk of stress-related ailments).
So, how should we think about stress?
To start – I believe that in order to effectively address stress in the context of women’s health and maternal health, we need a more comprehensive understanding of the stressors in our everyday lives, the links between stressors, and what these stressors and links mean for mothers and birthing parents and caregivers to and through all stages of pregnancy and parenting.
Additionally, we need a universal shift that enables a re-focus of stress management. We need evidential weight behind stress-reducing solutions that extend beyond personal responsibility and self-blame and lean into support structures and social change.
The Maternal Stress Project is an exploratory initiative with the goal of mapping and describing the stressors related to modern American motherhood and elevating solutions to address these stressors. The mapping phase will start by identifying and exploring key, layered stressor ‘nodes’ in the web — how they are connected, and how solutions within and between the nodes work to alleviate/buffer stress exposure.
This first phase will be grounded in gathering evidence from basic science and/or applied research as available (including discussion on the absence of scientific research at stressor nodes, which is helpful to the conversation as well!) Nodes, connections, and solutions will also be explored with experts who know far more than me from their own experience and their own expertise in specific areas.
The project will thrive on collaboration. I see the map and the information underlying it in an iterative state with constant evolution as more experts and members of the community contribute to the discussion. In addition, this first phase of The Maternal Stress Project is a base layer to build upon – a central thesis that contextualizes stress in an actionable way with loads of opportunities for project collaboration (got an idea? Reach out!)
As for the Why now? — the necessary funding, research, and scientific culture shifts will take decades to fill in the gaps critical for improving maternal/women’s/caregiver’s health. We deserve to be healthy TODAY.
If we do this right, ‘stress’ as a word, will become an actionable term while we wait for the research to catch up. Especially in the context of women’s health.
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I've just discovered your publication and am SO exciting to read everything you've published so far on this project. As a mom myself and a holistic career coach focused on burnout and fulfillment of parents, this is something I'm so passionate about, and I'm so grateful you're here to do this type of work!!
Also, 100% agree-- we need stress management help that isn't so focused on idividual responsibility... The only solution to a system wide problem can't be to place more burden on those overly burdened to begin with!! This is my beef with most organizational sponsored stress & burnout solutions as well.
I work in the narratives/advice around infant sleep and the meta-messages sent to parents about it. The behavioral paradigm it's all based on places the responsibility for sleep problems squarely on parents (let's be real: moms), and if sleep training doesn't work, places the blame there too. Advice also ratchets up the stakes if parents don't start sleep training practically right after birth. Parents need sleep, but experts have also made them unnecessarily freaked out about their ability to figure out how to capably get it. I talk to new moms every day who already feel pressured, incompetent, and guilty.