La evaluación del trauma materno y de sus efectos en el niñouna revisión sistemática

Resumo

Studies and systematic reviews of a biological nature have systematically concluded that a trau-matic episode experienced by the mother can be transmitted to her offspring. Likewise, there are systematic reviews in which it is concluded that the depressive and anxious symptoms of mothers have psychopathological effects on their children. However, to date, there has been no systematic review of studies dating from the last five years that examine the psychopathological effects on the child of a traumatic interpersonal maternal experience and that evaluate both phenomena through the use of psychological instruments. The systematic review carried out in the present work tries to make up for this absence. We found that there is no consensus among the authors about what is understood by ‘maternal trauma’ and, therefore, there is no consensus about what assessment instruments to use to measure it. Regarding the psychopathological symptoms of chil-dren whose mothers have suffered a traumatic experience, the authors included in the systematic review object of this work focus, fundamentally, on the evaluation of internalizing symptoms of the depressive and/or anxious type and the most important evaluation instrument used is the (CBCL). Just one of the seven studies that have the highest internal validity of the fourteen included in the review uses the concept of 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder' (PTSD) when deter-mining the existence of ‘maternal trauma’ and to establish it as an independent variable, although, for this, the authors use a homogeneous sample from the socioeconomic and psychopathological point of view, which prevents the generalization of their conclusions to other populations; in addition, the number of mother-child dyads (n=64) is well below the average of the rest of the studies. It is therefore proposed that future research replicate this research by increasing the sam-ple of mother-child dyads as well as their population representativeness.