Pregnant women may be particularly vulnerable during Covid-19. During this period, they experienced a higher level of depression symptoms compared to similar cohorts of pregnant women before the pandemic period. Maternal depression can have several deleterious impacts on the child's development such as a greater risk of being born prematurely, of having sleep problems and of having poorer cognitive development. Children of depressed mothers also have poorer stress regulation which can be measured using cortisol which is an often studied stress hormone. Maternal depression can impact children's socio-cognitive development which can have negative effects throughout the baby's life. One way to study the sociocognitive development of babies is joint attention, which constitutes a founding factor in social cognition. EEG studies demonstrate distinct brain activities between babies of depressed mothers and babies of mothers with good mental health. This study will first investigate the consequences of prenatal and postnatal maternal depression during the Covid-19 period on the reactive stress of babies aged 2 to 3 years. Secondly, she will investigate the consequences of maternal depression on the baby's joint attention skills and on the associated brain activity using EEG.
