Faulty reasoning signals

• Appeal to Authority - 12.9%
• Framing Effect - 10.7%
• Hasty Generalization - 10.5%

Article text

Abigail Powers Lott Ph.D., ABPP

Science, Therapy, and Whole-Body Health

What's a Parent's Role?

Take our Authoritative Parenting Test

Find a family therapist near me

Parenting often requires regulating our own emotions to effectively respond to our children.

Postpartum PTSD symptoms may affect brain regions involved in emotion regulation and caregiving.

Trauma symptoms can make early parenting harder, but support and treatment can help.

Source: Natalia Vladimirova / Unsplash

My daughter headed off for a week at sleepaway camp for the first time this week. I was excited for her and knew she would do great. She is brave and confident in a way I love and admire. Still, the goodbye hit me harder than I expected. In that moment, I was leaving my baby girl. Where had the time gone? I managed not to cry and kept my cool as she headed off to her swimming test without even looking back. As a parent, I knew that was exactly what I was supposed to do. My job was not to make my emotions the center of her experience. My job was to regulate myself enough to give her the freedom to have her own experience—to feel excited, nervous, proud, homesick, or whatever else came up for her.

And yet, it felt like just yesterday that she was a baby in my arms.

That moment at camp is just one version of a task parents face over and over: feeling our own emotions deeply while also needing to regulate them enough to make room for our children’s emotions and needs. This is not an easy task, and we don’t get to wait until our children are walking and talking to face it. This kind of emotion regulation begins much earlier, and we know it is especially relevant in early postpartum , when babies first begin learning their own regulation by tuning into their parent’s responses. Managing one’s own emotions is helpful for being able to offer warm, flexible, and attuned responses as a parent.

Source: Hollie Santos / Unsplash

In this time, new mothers are learning their babies’ cues, responding to varied needs, and at the same time recovering physically and sleeping very little. For many mothers, this is a period of love and early connection with baby, but it is also a period of vulnerability, especially for women struggling with mental health symptoms. While more awareness has emerged for depression and anxiety in the postpartum period, this is also a time of high vulnerability for posttraumatic stress symptoms, yet we know very little about the impacts of trauma symptoms in this time.

How Trauma Symptoms Affect the Maternal Brain

Our team at the Grady Trauma Project at Emory University has been working to better understand how posttraumatic stress symptoms may affect the maternal brain during this early postpartum period with the goal of identifying what kinds of supports may be most helpful and when. In a recent study led by Rebecca Lipschutz, trauma-exposed mothers came into the lab when their babies were 6-12 weeks old.(1) First, we observed mothers and babies during a caregiving interaction. Later, trained coders rated maternal sensitivity, representing how well mothers noticed and responded flexibly and warmly to their infants’ cues. A week or two later, mothers completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan (fMRI). During the scan, they listened to recordings of their own babies crying as well as control sounds. This allowed us to examine which parts of their brain were activated in response to their own infant’s distress.

Source: Jessica Hearn / Unsplash

We found that higher maternal sensitivity in the context of caregiving was related to greater activation in the insula, a brain region involved in noticing important emotional and bodily signals. In parenting , this may help mothers tune in to what their baby is communicating. Mothers with high levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms, however, showed more blunted activation in this region, along with other key regions, including the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The amygdala helps detect threat and emotional salience, while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex helps regulate emotional responses and calm the body’s threat system. So, moms with high symptoms were showing reduced engagement in these emotion salience and regulation regions.

This does not mean mothers with posttraumatic stress symptoms cannot be sensitive, loving, responsive mothers. Many are extraordinarily attuned to their children. But it does mean that trauma symptoms can sometimes make the work of parenting harder, especially during a period already marked by stress, sleep deprivation, physical discomfort, and hormonal changes, all factors that can make emotion regulation even harder.

These findings also point toward hope. The postpartum period is a time of vulnerability, but it is also a time of remarkable capacity for change. If we can identify mothers who are struggling and connect them with effective support, we may be able to improve maternal well-being and support healthier parent-child relationships, which also helps children long-term.

Why Screening for PTSD and Trauma-Related Distress in New Mothers Matters

Evidence-based treatments that directly target posttraumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ), like trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy , may be one important pathway. Treatments that strengthen emotion regulation, reduce physiological arousal, and help mothers respond to distress without becoming overwhelmed, such as mindfulness and emotion regulation skills-based interventions, may also be useful. But before any of that can happen, we have to identify who needs support. That is why screening for PTSD and trauma-related distress in the perinatal period matters. We routinely ask new mothers about depression, and that is essential. But for many women, trauma-related symptoms, such as intrusive memories of past trauma, avoidance, hypervigilance, or emotional numbing, may be a central part of their postpartum experience. When we fail to ask about trauma, we miss opportunities to help.

Watching my daughter walk away toward camp reminded me that parenting so often requires regulating ourselves first. That is true in big transitions, like saying goodbye at camp, but it is also true in the earliest days of motherhood, when a mother is learning to read her infant’s cues, respond to distress, and stay regulated enough to soothe. For many women, this work unfolds while they are also carrying trauma symptoms, stress, exhaustion, and physical recovery. Supporting mothers during this critical period is not optional. It is foundational to maternal mental health, to infant development, and to the well-being of families and communities.

Parenting Essential Reads

Growing Children by Stepping Back

How to Do Special Time With Your Child, Even When It Seems Hard

If you are a mother in postpartum and feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone. Resources are available. Check out Postpartum Support International , and if you need immediate support, you can call or text the 988 lifeline. To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.

1. Lipschutz, R., Dahlgren, K., Santos, J., Chambers, K., McAfee, E., Abrams, C., ... & Stevens, J. S. (2026). Neural correlates of maternal posttraumatic stress in the first postpartum year: Blunted salience and prefrontal responses to infant distress. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging .

Abigail Powers Lott, Ph.D., ABPP, is a board certified psychologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. She serves as Co-Director of the Grady Trauma Project and Clinical Director of the Grady Trauma Recovery Center.

More from Abigail Powers Lott Ph.D., ABPP

More from Psychology Today