Paternal Perinatal Stress and its Impact on Infants and Children

Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

DOI: 10.13056/acamh.24336
In this Papers Podcast, Dr. Fiona Challacombe discusses her JCPP paper ‘Paternal perinatal stress is associated with children’s emotional problems at 2 years’ (https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13695). Fiona is the first author of the paper.
There is an overview of the paper, methodology, key findings, and implications for practice.
Discussion points include:

• Why fathers have been largely left out of the picture in terms of parental mental health in pregnancy and post-partum, and why it is important to include them.
• How the engagement of fathers in clinical services could be improved.
• The impact of father’s mental health on infant and child development.
• Does paternal emotional stress exert a different influence on infants and children in comparison to maternal emotional distress?
• Implications of their findings for health care providers and child and adolescent mental health professionals.
• The existing intervention strategies and targeted interventions that are found to work for paternal perinatal stress, and what more could be done.

In this series, we speak to authors of papers published in one of ACAMH’s three journals. These are The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (JCPP); The Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) journal; and JCPP Advances.