Early interactive behaviours in preterm infants and their mothers: Influences of maternal depressive symptomatology and neonatal birth weight

Parenting behavior at 2 years predicts school‐age performance at 7 years in very preterm children

“…Parental facilitation and scaffolding need to be matched to the child's developmental level (Vygotsky, 1978) and this may be more challenging for some parents of VPT children who need to find a balance between providing increased support for a vulnerable and possibly passive VPT child and avoiding intrusive behavior that denies the child appropriate stimulation and opportunities to grow (Eiser, Eiser, Mayhew, & Gibson, 2005). Finding this balance requires a high level of parent sensitivity to the child's cues and behavior, however, some parents of preterm infants have been reported to have more difficulties with sensitivity than parents of fullterm infants (Agostini et al, 2014). Thus, it is possible that parents of VPT children will benefit from more specific support to find this balance.…”

Dyadic co-regulation, affective intensity and infant's development at 12 months: A comparison among extremely preterm and full-term dyads

“…Another study, employing rating scales on several aspects of maternal behaviours (i.e., sensitivity, responsiveness, level of activity and engagement, quality of handling, frequency of vocalisation and of positive emotional expressions, timing, nondirectiveness and non-interference) with preterm infants of a wide GA range (25-36 weeks), has found that high-anxiety mothers were more intrusive and more active during interaction with their preterm infants at 6 months with respect to mothers who experienced little or no anxiety during the postnatal period (Wijnroks, 1999). Finally, a recent study, conducted on very-low-birth weight (VLBW) and extremely-low-birth weight (ELBW) infants, showed that the mothers of both preterm groups at 3 months demonstrated strong closeness and involvement with their babies and adequacy to understand their infants' signals; however, the ELBW group was simultaneously characterised by a more "intrusive and controlling" mothering (Agostini, Neri, Dellabartola, Biasini, & Monti, 2014).…”

Maternal object naming is less adapted to preterm infants’ than to term infants’ word mapping

“…In contrast, the term infants’ looked longer to familiar word–object pairings if their mother named the objects more frequently during the play episode at visit 1 (Figure A). These findings suggest that well‐adapted maternal naming is critical to infants’ word‐mapping development (Gogate & Hollich, , , ); ill‐adapted maternal naming (Agostini et al, ; Barnard et al, ; Dale et al, ; Field, ; Landry, ; Stevenson et al, ) can delay word‐mapping development.…”

“…In comparison, mothers’ communication and preterm infants’ responsiveness seem less well adapted to one another. Mothers of preterm infants provide heightened levels of stimulation than mothers of term infants around 3–4 months (Agostini et al, ; Dale, Greenberg & Crnic, ; Field, ; Stevenson, Roach, Leavitt & Miller, ). This declines around 24 months, contains fewer positive messages in teaching situations and less involvement in daily activities (Barnard, Bee & Hammond, ).…”