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Maternal heavy alcohol use during pregnancy is harmful to offspring's health and adjustment. However, findings from studies on lower levels of prenatal drinking are mixed; a few even predict positive cognitive and psychosocial outcomes. Given that alcohol is a neurotoxin and teratogen, scholars question developmental benefits and point to residual confounding as a potential explanation, particularly as light drinkers are positively selected with respect to health and socioeconomic status. Using prospective, intergenerational data from the nationally-representative Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) in the United Kingdom, we studied associations between mother's drinking during pregnancy and children's cognitive and psychosocial outcomes at ages 3, 5, 7, 11, and 14 years (n = 10,454). We included early life confounders (e.g., maternal education, health, smoking) and mother's cognitive ability, and assessed robustness of relationships across outcomes and alternate drinking classifications. Results of a series of multivariable regression models found no association between light drinking and cognitive and psychosocial outcomes up to and including the age of 14, after controlling for key confounders. Light drinking during pregnancy was linked to higher socioeconomic advantages (e.g., mothers' higher education, professional/managerial occupation, home ownership, cognitive scores), which together accounted for positive associations between light drinking and children's outcomes. Mother's cognitive ability was an especially important confounder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There is much research to suggest that maternal psychological distress is associated with many adverse outcomes in children. This study examined, for the first time, if it is related to children's affective decision-making.Methods: Using data from 12,080 families of the Millennium Cohort Study, we modelled the effect of trajectories of maternal psychological distress in early-to-middle childhood (3-11 years) on child affective decision-making, measured with a gambling task at age 11.Results: Latent class analysis showed four longitudinal types of maternal psychological distress (chronically high, consistently low, moderate-accelerating and moderate-decelerating). Maternal distress typology predicted decision-making but only in girls. Specifically, compared to girls growing up in families with never-distressed mothers, those exposed to chronically high maternal psychological distress showed more risk-taking, bet more and exhibited poorer risk-adjustment, even after correction for confounding. Most of these effects on girls' decision-making were not robust to additional controls for concurrent internalising and externalising problems, but chronically high maternal psychological distress was associated positively with risk-taking even after this adjustment. Importantly, this association was similar for those who had reached puberty and those who had not.Limitations: Given the study design, causality cannot be inferred. Therefore, we cannot propose that treating chronic maternal psychological distress will reduce decision-making pathology in young females.Conclusions: Our study suggests that young daughters of chronically distressed mothers tend to be particularly reckless decision-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]