It’s normal for expectant parents to worry if they don’t feel a strong connection to the baby right away. “Those kinds of mixed fears and anxieties are really common in most pregnancies, certainly first pregnancies,” said Dorothy Greenfeld, a licensed clinical social worker and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale School of Medicine. Bonding is a process that takes time, and while it can begin in pregnancy, the relationship between parent and child mostly develops after birth.

Psychiatric conditions, and the medicines used to treat them, can complicate the picture. Antidepressants, the most widely used class of psychiatric drugs, do not seem to interfere with a woman’s attachment to the fetus during pregnancy, as measured by the amount of time the mother spends thinking about and planning for the baby, a 2011 study in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health found. On the other hand, the study found that women with major depression in pregnancy had lower feelings of maternal-fetal attachment, and this sense of disconnection intensified with more severe symptoms of depression. to read more from ALICE CALLAHAN, click here.