Illustration by Allegra Lockstadt
illustration of generations
Molly Mogren Katt was at prenatal yoga when she had her first baby-related panic attack. It was 2016, and she had all the typical worries of a first-time mom. Were her nightly baths too hot? Was her career as a self-employed writer doomed? Would she still have time for the dog while caring for a newborn? How badly was childbirth going to hurt?
But those weren’t the questions giving her head-spinning, finger-tingling anxiety on the yoga mat that day. For Katt, there was a deeper concern: As the daughter of a mother with a mental health condition and as a survivor of an abusive childhood, she feared she might be destined to repeat history.
“Would I find it in myself to control my rage, or would any irritant cause me to scream and claw at my daughter, leaving deep scratches in the fleshy part of her arms?” the Minneapolis-based writer asks on the pages of her memoir-in-progress. “Would I be the safe mama bear my daughter ran to when scared, or would I be the bear causing her to run?”
While grappling with the past and her fears about the future, Katt’s memoir, Mom Genes, also explores a burgeoning field of research into the ways that trauma can get passed down from generation to generation, and not just through learned behaviors. Increasingly, scientists are finding that adversity in childhood may alter a person’s biology in ways that can get inherited by their children. As she learned about the phenomenon, known as epigenetics, Katt wondered: Was she trapped by a history that was out of her control?
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Katt comes from a long line of traumatized mothers. Her great-great-grandmother died in childbirth, leaving her great-grandmother to grow up without a mom. Her daughter (Katt’s grandmother) got pregnant as a teenager and was sent from her small farm town to a home for unwed mothers in the Twin Cities, where she received no therapy, was instructed to hide her real name, and, after a traumatic birth, was told to leave the baby and forget she was ever born. That baby—Katt’s mom—spent the first few weeks of her life in a nursery with minimal attention before being adopted by a loving family.
That formative infancy, Katt thinks, instilled a deep fear of rejection in her mother, who was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It wasn’t until she became pregnant herself that Katt started to think about the history lurking in her own body.
“A lot of what happened to my grandma and to my mom,” she says, “I do kind of wonder how that affects me now.”
Observations about intergenerational trauma date back to the 1960s, focusing at first on the children of Holocaust survivors, and hundreds of studies since then have documented elevated rates of anxiety, depression, nightmares, and PTSD in that group. The field has since grown to include descendants of Vietnam veterans, displaced Native Americans, survivors of the Rwandan genocide, and Black people who were enslaved, among others.
At first, psychologists assumed that traumatic experiences altered the behavior of parents, which, in turn, affected their children. But by the 1990s, scientists were starting to accumulate clues to suggest that trauma can cause biological changes. In a landmark study, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta trained male mice to be afraid of particular odors, says Cassandra Hendrix, a developmental psychologist at NYU Langone. When those mice reproduced, their offspring feared the same odors, the team reported in 2014, even when the babies had no contact with either parent.
Similar findings are starting to emerge in people, too. In a study of Black women that was published in 2021, Hendrix and colleagues found that among babies born to mothers who experienced emotional neglect in childhood, there were particularly strong neural connections between regions of the brain that are involved in detecting threats and learning to be afraid. In a newer study that has yet to be published, the same differences showed up in utero.
The research focused on Black mothers because they have disproportionately high rates of preterm birth in the U.S. and are disproportionately exposed to chronic adversity like discrimination, Hendrix says, and she suspects that adverse childhood experiences, including discrimination, could alter the way a mother’s placenta forms during pregnancy, which could allow more stress hormones to cross the placental barrier and change the way her baby’s brain develops.
Those changes are not necessarily a bad thing, she adds; they might be protective. But either way, the findings offer powerful evidence that a mom’s experience can get under her skin in generation-altering ways.
“The fact that we can see these associations really early, before the child has been exposed to years of parenting, suggests that there might be a biological mechanism of transmission that’s happening,” Hendrix says.
“If you stand in the ocean, the waves may push you in a certain direction, but you don’t have to swim in that direction.”
Cassandra Hendrix, psychologist
Katt was born in St. Paul but grew up in Stillwater. Her parents separated when she was 10. After that, she and her younger brother spent half their time with each parent. When they were with their mom, everything could be fine one day. But other days, unpredictable circumstances would trigger her mother’s rage, and Katt would lock herself in the bathroom until the mood passed. She kept a stack of magazines in there to pass the time.
Katt got used to mean comments and confusing humiliations, like when her mother would read her diary out loud to friends. But even when her mother’s therapist told her, at age 16, that her mom had bipolar disorder, Katt thought that, because her mother was sick, she needed to accept the behavior. And for a long time, she thought it was her fault—that there must be something wrong with her for her mother to treat her that way.
A lot of kids have experiences like these. Hendrix says that an estimated 40 percent of women in the U.S. have experienced trauma in childhood. But they are not doomed to repeat the cycle, research suggests. In 2019, the same group that taught mice to be afraid of smells taught another group of smell-averse mice to be OK with the smells. Their offspring, in turn, did not inherit the fear.
Trauma-informed interventions, like therapy and parenting classes, Hendrix says, can help people learn to cope with their past, stop blaming themselves, and learn to parent differently from how they were parented.
“If you stand in the ocean, the waves may push you in a certain direction, but you don’t have to swim in that direction. If you’re given practice and you’re given support, you can learn to move in the direction that you want to move,” she says. “You as a parent are empowered to shape your own child’s development by giving them the kind of caregiving that you wish that you’d had.”
Even though genes can influence predispositions, nothing is set in stone, adds Sylia Wilson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, who is studying the children of identical twins to investigate the roles of genes and the environment in outcomes such as depression and substance abuse.
“Just because you have a parent who’s affected by mental illness doesn’t mean that you necessarily will be affected by it yourself,” she says. “And just because you are a parent who is affected by mental illness doesn’t mean that your child is destined to a lifetime of dealing with one.”
For Katt, therapy, writing, and conversations with friends have helped her accept her past and start to shape her future—and the future of her children, now 5 and 3. When she feels frustrated with her kids, she takes a break. Every night at bedtime, she tells them she loves them and that she’s the luckiest mom in the world.
“I’m proud of the parent I am,” Katt says, “and how much thought I put into how I love and care for my kids.”
