Launching the Center for the Transition to Parenthood

ith a transformative gift of $21 million from the Bezos Family Foundation, the Columbia University Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology established the Center for the Transition to Parenthood. A first of its kind in the field, the center will focus on reinventing prenatal care, with a dual emphasis on the inter-related areas of parent mental health and infant development.

Rooted in a deep understanding of the prenatal period’s developmental importance for parents-to-be and future children, the center will utilize a research-to-practice approach to promote the health of new parents and their developing infants. “Understanding what happens to the parental brain – during and after pregnancy, as well as how maternal stress affects the developing brain – and applying that knowledge to our care model, allows us to improve outcomes for both parents and infants,” says Catherine Monk, PhD, who leads the center.

A distinguished clinician, researcher, and educator, Dr. Monk, Chief of the Department’s Women’s Mental Health Division, has decades of experience supporting the well-being of pregnant people and their infants. Dr. Monk is the inaugural Diana Vagelos Professor of Women’s Mental Health in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and a Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, as well as a research scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Her research with pregnant women has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for over 20 years. Additionally, Dr. Monk is the founding director of Women’s Mental Health @Ob/Gyn, a clinical service that addresses women’s mental health across the life course, embedded within the other Ob/Gyn clinical services.

Under the leadership of Dr. Monk, the center will take an interdisciplinary approach to care, drawing on expertise from the fields of perinatal psychiatry, obstetrics, developmental psychobiology, and neuroscience. The center’s team will include psychologists, neuroscientists, mental health clinicians, and community experts such as doulas, midwives, and family medicine doctors. With a strong commitment to providing equitable care, the center will build relationships with community-based organizations, community health workers, and patients with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences. The input of these key groups will inform the development of the center’s support tools, created by and for their intended users.

In practice, the center will develop, test and implement various educational tools to support the well-being of new parents. Specific focus areas will include stress reduction, improving social support, protecting sleep, setting parenting intentions, preparing for postpartum isolation, managing relationship conflicts, and establishing an understanding of fetal exposures which increase the risk of neurobehavioral disorders later in life.

The center will serve as a pioneer in enhancing prenatal care and spearheading cutting-edge research that leads to novel interventions. By focusing on maternal social and psychological health as the earliest determinants of an infant’s developmental trajectory, the center aims to reduce maternal mental health problems and the risk of mental health disorders in children. “The very generous support from the Bezos Family Foundation enables us to envision — and enact — 21^st century, whole-person, two-generation prenatal care, to help build healthy families at their origins,” says Dr. Monk.