Effect of early intervention on social interaction between mothers and preterm infants at 12 months of age: A randomized controlled trial

Parents as practitioners in preterm care

“…Over the past 25 years several family-centred care programs have been developed and subjected to randomized controlled trials [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63]. These programs use one or more approaches, such as parent education, provision of psychological support, teaching developmental care, and facilitating better communication, to address a variety of domains including parent-infant interaction, parental knowledge and confidence, and parental stress.…”

“…These programs use one or more approaches, such as parent education, provision of psychological support, teaching developmental care, and facilitating better communication, to address a variety of domains including parent-infant interaction, parental knowledge and confidence, and parental stress. Most of the trials reported beneficial short and long-term infant and parent outcomes, including shorter hospital stay [55], better cognitive development [48,54,58,61], improved mother-infant interaction and attachment [49,56], reduced parenting stress [54][55][56], less maternal depression and anxiety [55,58], improved maternal confidence in parenting [55,58], better maternal sensitivity/ responsiveness [60], and higher maternal self-efficacy [61]. Two studies of a parent education program failed to find any effect on infant development, maternal stress/anxiety, or maternal-infant interaction [51,63].…”

Family-Centered Developmentally Supportive Care in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Exploring the Role and Training of Child Life Specialists

“…Stressors include an unpredicted admission, complex medical procedures and pain experienced by the infant, separation from the infant, inability to provide routine mothering activities, inability to communicate effectively with hospital staff, coping with the busy NICU environment, length of the hospital stay, and associated difficulties such as finances and employment (Fowlie & McHaffie, 2004;Holditch-Davis & Miles, 2000). One study found that even after two months since discharge from the NICU, parents of preterm infants are more stressed and feel less competent to care for the infant at home than parents of full-term infants (Olshtain-Mann & Auslander, 2008 Providing psychosocial support for parents can reduce stress and improve longterm outcomes, including increased maternal sensitivity and increased positive mood in infants (Ravn et al, 2011). Strategies such as encouraging mothers' participation in the infants' care by providing skin-to-skin contact, diapering, and soothing (Aagaard & Hall, 2008;Cooper, et al, 2007), effective communication with hospital staff (Fowlie & McHaffie, 2004), and support from their faith or religious personnel (Nottage, 2005) can help to reduce stress of parents in the NICU.…”

Stressfylt amming og samspill

“…Kvaliteten på tilknytningen er assosiert med graden av sensitiv, responderende, kontinuerlig og forutsigbar omsorg (20). I tillegg er foreldrenes evne til å forstå årsaker til barnets følel-sesuttrykk, omtalt som mentalisering, viktig (16 (26,27). Helsepersonell som veiledere og brukere som ekspert på seg selv, framheves i det helsefremmende arbeidet (28).…”