Journal of Pediatric Neurological Disorders

Effects Of Stress On Child IQ

Children who are under emotional or physical stress score 13 percent lower on intelligence tests than youngsters who are functioning virtually worry-free. The evidence for negative influences of maternal stress during pregnancy on child cognition remains inconclusive. A latent factor of prenatal stress was constructed, and child IQ was tested at age 6 years. In Dutch and Caribbean participants, prenatal stress wasn't related to child IQ after adjustment for maternal IQ and socioeconomic status. In other ethnicities no association was found; only within the Moroccan/Turkish A small negative association between prenatal stress and child IQ was observed. These results suggest that prenatal stress doesn't predict child IQ, except in children from less acculturated minority groups. Fetal neurodevelopment represents a vulnerable period in which maternal exposure to stress is suggested to have a long-term impact on the for inconsistent study results may be that the concept of maternal stress during pregnancy is imprecisely and differently defined; most previous research encompassed only one dimension as the measure of stress, such as psychopathology or stress reactions to specific events, and key confounders such as maternal IQ were often not taken into account.    

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