mom cycle graph
Think back to your middle school or early teenage years. You might have been worried about your grades, or how you came across to everyone else, or why you were suddenly sprouting body hair all over the place, or how incredibly annoying your parents suddenly seemed. Whatever was on your mind, there's a good chance you don't recall those years as among your favorites.

You're not the only one who isn't thrilled with the adolescent experience, psychologists are finding. And if you happen to now be a mother with kids approaching middle school, your happiness might be about to dip again.

In fact, how well-adjusted moms are can depend a lot on what developmental stage their kids are going through, psychologists at Arizona State University in Tempe report in a new study. In a survey of many aspects of wellbeing and satisfaction, moms with kids in middle school faced drops in many areas, while those with adult children and infants fared the best.

"The literature on parenting is rife with studies of how mothers affect their children, yet there is little systematic effort to understand factors associated with mothers' own distress or well-being, and how this might vary from their children's birth through adulthood," wrote the researchers, who published the findings this month in the journal Developmental Psychology. "We hope that this initial exploration...will spark further research on mothers as people, and not just as caregivers."

The team took a survey of more than 2,200 mothers, asking about different aspects of wellbeing, parenting, and perception of their offspring (like children's views of their parents, how mothers see their kids can fluctuate over time). Then the researchers examined how the average scores rose or dipped depending on whether the moms' charges were going through infancy, preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school or adulthood.

To get a picture of the mothers' wellbeing, the researchers included questions designed to measure anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, satisfaction with life and feelings of emptiness and of fulfillment. The moms also reported on how satisfied and guilty they felt with their parenting, how overloaded they felt and how they interacted with their kids.

Middle school: fun for nobody

The researchers had a suspicion that things might be rockiest for the moms of middle school kids, since that is when kids start to contend with puberty and forge their own identities. "In parallel with their children's significant stressors, mothers of middle schoolers themselves confront several new developmental challenges," wrote the researchers. Many are baffled by how rapidly their kids' personas are morphing, hurt by what seems like rebelliousness or moodiness and worried that their children will experiment with drugs or take other risks.

As expected, the researchers found that middle school represented a low point for moms, with peak scores of emptiness and fraught interactions with kids, and ebbing in scores of life and parenting satisfaction.

These scores don't mean that the moms were miserable, though. The middle school moms' scores weren't drastically different in most areas from those of moms with elementary or high school aged children. "Our data simply reflect gradual but consistent increases in maternal distress that peak when children are in middle school, just as well-being indices reach their lowest point at that period," the researchers wrote.

Some of mothers' distress as their kids navigate middle school may stem from picking up on their children's unhappiness and worrying about how best to shield and support them.

Another source of distress may be aging — many women hit middle age as their kids hit middle school. During this time, people realize that they have started aging and many also have the least satisfaction and most strife in their marriages. So women have plenty of their own issues to deal with while their kids are in middle school, which could also impact their wellbeing scores.

What infants and grown-up children have in common

The researchers also speculated that, in general, moms of infants would be hitting a rough patch. Babies are a lot of work, and new parents can struggle with balancing childcare with the demands of their jobs and feeling like their own freedom has been curtailed. Studies have also found that many people's romantic relationships suffer a bit in the first several years of parenthood.

But in fact, women with infants did not report lower wellbeing and actually had higher life satisfaction on average than others. They were more overloaded than those with teens on average, but also felt more satisfied with their parenting.

"Children's infancy may in fact be trying for mothers in some respects, but rewarding in others," the researchers pointed out.

One group that the researchers did expect to be under less strain were mothers whose children had grown up. Sure enough, mothers of adult children felt significantly less overloaded and clashed with their children less than all other groups. And compared with the middle school mothers, those with grown children did significantly better in terms of stress, loneliness and satisfaction and guilt about their parenting, and had more positive perceptions of their kids.

"Our findings support suggestions that the 'empty nest' syndrome is largely a myth," the researchers wrote. "At the same time, extant evidence indicates that when adult children do return home...their co-residence is not associated with decreased parental well-being."

Down and up again

Overall, the findings indicate that the challenges of motherhood increase steadily as their offspring move out of babyhood but ease when the kids reach adulthood. Scores of mothers' wellbeing changed in a rough V-shape across children's age groups, with middle school the nadir in many ways.

These effects were more noticeable among mothers who had kids in only one age group than among those who had children of various ages. Kids' genders had little effect on their mothers' scores.

The experiences of women surveyed in this study may not represent those of all mothers. These moms were all American, and most were highly educated; 85 percent had college degrees and nearly half had graduate degrees.

The opportunity to obtain higher education is more common in affluent communities. One way this could have impacted scores is that moms with infants in this study may have been more likely to have the financial means to stay home with their kids or send their kids to daycare. "Thus, the birth of a child may in fact be among the most stressful developmental periods for mothers in general, but is less so—at least as compared to their children's early adolescence—among relatively affluent mothers," the researchers wrote.

Whether or not the V-shaped curve is typical across different groups of mothers, it still can't predict an individual woman's wellbeing or experience as a parent. But the researchers think that knowing what trends are common might still be helpful for many mothers.

"Research-based knowledge could help women to prepare for forthcoming stressors," the researchers wrote. And an "equally useful message to disseminate would be that things will probably get a great deal easier with time."