![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/ComputerUser2.jpg\" "\\"blogger\\"")
Even for well-prepared couples, the transition to parenthood can be downright stressful.<\/p>\n
Now a study offers some encouraging news: Blogging may be helping new moms.<\/p>\n
Based on research with 157 first-time mothers, former BYU student Brandon McDaniel and his two faculty mentors found that blogging was related to lower parenting stress and<\/strong> marital conflict.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cMuch more research is needed to come up with conclusive evidence, but at least for now it appears that first-time mothers who participate in blogging show greater levels of connection with family and friends, increased feelings of support, and more positive outcomes overall<\/strong>,\u201d McDaniel said.<\/p>\n The new study will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Maternal and Child Health Journal<\/em>. Fittingly, his wife runs a craft blog called \u201cPatches of Pink\u201d that served as a creative outlet and a way to connect with other moms following the birth of the McDaniel\u2019s child.<\/p>\n All of the new moms in the study had Internet access at home, and half of the mothers were employed. While the researchers found that moms benefited from blogging in several different ways, each benefit appeared to flow through increased feelings of social support.<\/p>\n \u201cSocial support is one of those \u2018Golden Variables\u2019 that positively influence many other measures of well-being, including relationship satisfaction, stress levels and mental health<\/strong>,\u201d said Erin Holmes, a professor of family life at BYU who co-authored the study with McDaniel.<\/p>\n The study authors caution that the study results are exploratory in nature. For example, it\u2019s possible that women with stronger relationships have a greater tendency to blog.<\/p>\n \u201cEven if this were the case, we hypothesize that blogging or reaching out to extended family and friends would reciprocally increase their perceptions of social support, as social support has been linked by prior research to a variety of maternal well-being outcomes,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the BYU press release via MedicalXPress: Even for well-prepared couples, the transition to parenthood can be downright stressful. Now a study offers some encouraging news: Blogging may be helping… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,9,7],"tags":[228,101,12,62],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":678,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions\/678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}