Summary Due to the general lack of familiarity with the concept in the medical field, resilience is rarely considered in pediatric medical traumas. Resilience is an ability that enables recovery after adversities such as traumas, surgeries, serious health problems, or social issues. Stress from medical traumas encompasses both the psychological and physical responses of children and their families. Lack of resilience in children with medical traumatic stress may contribute to poor adjustment, slow recovery, disruptive behaviors, and psychiatric disorders. Furthermore, persistent parental distress increases the child's risk of low resilience. Consequently, these patients and their parents require early identification. This is achievable using a common stress measure such as the Perceived Stress Scale. Moreover, health care providers can screen patients’ risks for low resilience, which include few social contacts, poor family functioning, and low cohesion among family members. Findings from the stress scale and screened risks could indicate the need for additional psychosocial support at the time of diagnosis of a serious illness, soon after injuries, and before and after operations. Such interventions can include decreasing distress, counseling children and their parents, and enabling strong connections to health care providers. Health care providers can help parents to minimize distress and adjust to their child's illness, thereby supporting the child's resilience, adjustment, and recovery.

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe parents’ experiences of jointly regulating their emotions when their child gets life-threateningly sick. The aim of this study was also to find out the parents’ experiences of the significance of dyadic emotion regulation for their personal coping and to discover the challenges in their dyadic emotion regulation. A purposive sample of 32 parents of seriously ill children was recruited from the Department of Pediatrics in Kuopio University Hospital and interviewed within 3 weeks of their child’s diagnosis. Videotaped interviews were analyzed by interpretative phenomenological analysis. The main themes of analysis were the recognition and disclosure of the needs of dyadic emotion regulation, load sharing and dyadic regulation of emotions, the importance of dyadic emotion regulation in terms of coping, and the challenges of dyadic emotion regulation. The subthemes of load sharing and dyadic regulation of emotions were recognizing another’s emotions; direct expression versus avoiding emotions; nonverbal interaction, presence, and intimacy; and verbal interaction. The results help health-care personnel to understand the connection between a child’s illness and the parents’ couple relationship, to recognize parents’ needs for emotional support, and to develop appropriate couple interventions for parents.

We evaluated psychiatric symptoms, posttraumatic growth, and life satisfaction among the parents (n = 34) of newborns (n = 17) requiring therapeutic hypothermia or urgent surgery (interest group). Our control group included 60 parents of healthy newborns (n = 30). The first surveys were completed soon after diagnosis or delivery and the follow-up surveys 1 year later (participation rate 88% in the interest group and 70% in the control group). General stress was common in both groups but was more prevalent in the interest group as were depressive symptoms, too. Anxiety was more common in the interest group, although it showed a decrease from the baseline in both groups. Life satisfaction had an inverse correlation with all measures of psychiatric symptoms, and it was lower in the interest group in the early stage, but similar at 12 months due to the slight decline in the control group. Mothers in the interest group had more anxiety and depressive symptoms than fathers in the early stage. Mothers had more traumatic distress than fathers at both time points. Half of the parents experienced substantial posttraumatic growth at 12 months. In conclusion, the serious illness of an infant substantially affects the well-being of the parents in the early stages of illness and one year after the illness.

The perinatal period is a sensitive time for the entire family. A newborn changes the dynamics in the family and requires continuous attention. Some relationships lack sufficient resources, which can lead to tension and conflicts between the parents. However, resilient relationships can even strengthen in the face of challenges, which can have a positive effect on life satisfaction (Isokääntä et al., 2019).Parental life satisfaction varies depending on the time after birth.In general, both new parents are satisfied with life around the time of delivery, but life satisfaction often slightly decreases over the following months as the burdens of parenthood increase (Aasheim et al., 2014). Nonetheless, pregnancy and delivery include multiple biological, social and psychological changes that can substantially impact on the parental relationship.

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