Parenting the Prematurely Born Child

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the findings of the nursing research on parenting the prematurely born child. This research focused on eight general areas: impact of the home environment on infant development status, the relationship between premature infants and their mothers during the first 2 years, parenting during hospitalization, maternal concerns about infant discharge, fathering, subpopulations of premature infants, parenting after the first 2 years, and interventions to improve parenting. There is a need to strengthen the design and conceptualization of these studies, to move toward more intervention research, and to do research that is more culturally sensitive, especially toward fathers, ethnic and cultural minority groups, and the poor.