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KVINNEHELSE-Kvinners helse og kjønnsperspektiver

Motherhood and Quality of Life: The causal processes of caregiving burden, illness coping, work-life, genetics and social relations.

Alternative title: Livskvalitet hos mødre. Sosiale relasjoner, omsorgsoppgaver, sykdomsmestring og arbeidsliv

Awarded: NOK 13.2 mill.

Wellbeing is a UN Sustainable Development Goal, a universal value, and has important consequences. Parenthood can be a source of joy, meaning and fulfillment. But care burdens and work life challenges may negatively affect quality of life and mental health. Compared with fathers, mothers have a higher risk of illness and sick leave, lower work participation and experience more care-related stressors throughout the childrearing years. This may have substantial adverse consequences. Despite 85% of Norwegian women becoming mothers, there is surprisingly little knowledge about the causes and consequences of maternal wellbeing. We aim to provide new knowledge on the sources and trajectories of wellbeing and resilience through the childrearing stage. This will provide important knowledge for illness prevention and for health and quality of life-promoting efforts. What processes and factors contribute to development and maintenance of wellbeing? Good social relationships may counteract and modify risk, promote coping and quality of life. But which aspects of which relations are most important? And how do genes and environmental factors interact over time and influence maternal resilience, social relations, and wellbeing? Our vision is to provide novel answers to the question of how women, as mothers, can live sustainable and fulfilling lives - with meaning, coping with adversity, well-staying and well-moving. We will focus on the complex and intertwined relations between wellbeing, adversities, and our social world, aiming to determine directions of causality, mediating and moderating mechanisms. To address these questions, we will use data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort study (MoBa), including follow-up data from 95,000 mothers collected over 20 years. The project is conducted at the Promenta Research Center at the Department of Psychology (UiO) and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, with the WHO Healthy Cities Network and Viken county municipality as partners. https://www.sv.uio.no/promenta/

Caregiving may bring joy and fulfilment, but excessive demands are likely to cause reduced wellbeing and both mental and physical health problems, short- or long-term. Throughout the childrearing years, mothers have excess risk of work absence, illness and care-related stressors impacting their future health and economic security. This project adopts an interdisciplinary and exposure-wide developmental approach to provide causal knowledge on the pathways to maternal wellbeing and examine gendered trajectories. We aim to delineate the putative mechanisms involved in associations between wellbeing and adversities related to caregiving, illness and work in order to identify wellness and resilience promoting factors. Hence, we will provide a reliable decision-making basis for practitioners and policy-makers to formulate informed strategies to address women's health and quality of life. We particularly focus on social relations and genetic influences. Good social relations may counteract and modify risks inherent in adversity. Social relations are modifiable factors that may be optimal targets for health promotive and illness preventive efforts. We will move beyond the unidimensional concept of social support and identify factors in the web of social relations that protect against the negative impact of adversity, and build resilience and coping resources. The project capitalizes on cutting-edge methods and leverages unique longitudinal and genetically informative data over 20 years in the Mother, Father and Child Cohort study. The data include a total of N>95,000 mothers, genotyping and provide opportunities to model gene-environment interplay, control for genetic confounding and for testing of causality. The project will be located at the PROMENTA Research Center at the University of Oslo and involves collaboration with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, the WHO Healthy Cities, Viken County and outstanding international researchers.

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KVINNEHELSE-Kvinners helse og kjønnsperspektiver

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