Stress e stati emotivi durante la gravidanza, il parto e il puerpuerio. Un’analisi delle narrative di 52 madri con bambini di 2 mesi.

The experience of pregnancy and motherhood is a complex event in which individual, social, and cultural factors interact to produce different levels of adaptation to the new role as a parent. In this study, we analyzed the narratives of 52 mothers with infants aged 2 months to identify the main sources of stress across the periods of pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum, and the emotional states remembered by the mothers in relation to these periods. A thematic analysis revealed that during pregnancy, mothers were especially concerned about prenatal screening, whereas delivery was considered as a relatively stressful, but natural event marked by mixed feelings, ranging from anxiety and fear to positive excitement and joy. For these mothers, the most critical phase was the postpartum period at home, during which they faced a number of adaptation tasks mainly related to the assumption of the parental role and the restructuring of daily routines. More specifically, reported problems included breastfeeding, painful aftereffects of delivery, lack of sleep, emotional instability, difficulties in managing the household and the family, and inexperience with babies, especially in primiparous mothers who could not rely on an effective social support. These results are discussed in terms of their clinical implications.