Mothers, some of the most potent parental influence you will have on your child takes place while he or she is still in your womb — so let’s hope that most of your days while pregnant are Happy Mother’s Days! While you are pregnant, your baby’s organs and tissues develop in direct response to lessons they receive about the world. These lessons come from your diet, your behavior and your state of mind — thereby hinting at the function of joy in pregnancy.

If there is chronic stress in pregnancy, if a pregnant mother’s thoughts and emotions are persistently negative, if she is experiencing unrelenting anxiety, the internal message — delivered to the developing baby — is, “It’s a dangerous world out there,” regardless of whether or not this is objectively true. The baby’s neural cells and nervous system development will actually mutate (adapt) to prepare for the unsafe environment it perceives it is going to be born into. {Read the rest of this post at mothering.com}

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emilianohorcada under a Creative Commons license