EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Ups and Downs in the Joy of Motherhood: Maternal Well-Being as a Function of Psychological Needs, Personality, and Infant Temperament

Katrijn Brenning (), Bart Soenens, Elien Mabbe and Maarten Vansteenkiste
Additional contact information
Katrijn Brenning: Ghent University
Bart Soenens: Ghent University
Elien Mabbe: Ghent University
Maarten Vansteenkiste: Ghent University

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2019, vol. 20, issue 1, No 13, 229-250

Abstract: Abstract The present study aims to investigate several relevant psychological factors, including both mother characteristics (i.e., basic psychological need satisfaction and frustration, depressogenic personality) and child characteristics (i.e., infant temperament) in relation to daily variation in maternal well-being. Mothers (N = 126) participated in a five-day diary study shortly after child-birth, when the child went to day-care for the first time. The latter specific episode was chosen as this period is potentially stressful (due to parent–child separation and challenges in work–family life balance) and within-person variation is expected to be high in such episodes. At the within-person level, day-to-day variation in psychological need satisfaction and frustration related to day-to-day variability in maternal well-being. At the between-person level, maternal self-criticism related negatively to well-being, while perceived infant temperament yielded few direct associations. Instead, the child’s temperament played a moderating role in the association between basic psychological needs and maternal well-being. The findings of this study underscore the importance of a dynamic view on maternal well-being, with basic psychological needs, maternal personality and infant temperament contributing to well-being in a complex fashion.

Keywords: Diary study; Maternal well-being; Basic psychological needs; Depressogenic personality; Infant temperament (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10902-017-9936-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jhappi:v:20:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10902-017-9936-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... fe/journal/10902/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10902-017-9936-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Happiness Studies is currently edited by Antonella Delle Fave

More articles in Journal of Happiness Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:jhappi:v:20:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s10902-017-9936-0