BACKGROUND: This study investigated the early processes involved in the development of symptoms of conduct disorder and hyperactivity. METHOD: The study employed a prospective design, over a period from 2 months to 8 years. Detailed observational data of early and later mother-child interactions were collected, infant prefrontal function (the A ...

Very preterm birth (< 30 weeks' gestation) is a stressful event for parents, and few support interventions for these parents have been evaluated. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of parent-to-parent peer support for mothers of very preterm infants in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). In this cohort ...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Parents are attached to their unborn children, and loss around the time of birth is a serious trauma. Parental grief is a normal response, and may last for many months. Clinicians have always sought to implement practices that will help recovery, and for a generation, have advocated ...

This longitudinal study compared infant care competence, infant temperament, and parenting stress of younger (less than 17 years) and older (greater than or equal to 17 years) adolescent mothers. Relationships were examined between situational, maternal infant care competence, and infant temperament. Staged multiple regression was used to quantify the role ...

CONTEXT: Interest in the discarding or killing of newborns by parents has increased due to wide news coverage and efforts by states to provide Safe Haven legislation to combat the problem. OBJECTIVE: To describe the characteristics of these cases in North Carolina. DESIGN, SETTING, AND POPULATION: Case series derived from ...

The provision of maternal-infant body contact during a period of maternal separation was examined for its effects on parent-infant and triadic interactions. Participants were 146 three-month-old preterm infants and their parents, half of whom received skin-to-skin contact, or kangaroo care (KC), in the neonatal nursery. Global relational style and micro-patterns ...

This study examined the degree to which parental contextual factors and infant characteristics predicted whether parents read aloud to their 8-month-old infants. Discriminant function analysis revealed that mothers with higher family incomes and those who reported less parenting stress and fewer general hassles were more likely to read to their ...

BACKGROUND: Active parent involvement in caring for their infants in the neonatal care unit is thought to improve parent-infant attachment and to moderate the psychological stress for parents, but few recent studies have examined parent visiting patterns and participation in infant caregiving. The study purposes were to describe the frequency ...

Apnea and cardiorespiratory home monitors are commonly used for electronic surveillance of infants. Frequent alarms can be very stressful for parents and lead to unnecessarily prolonged home monitoring. The aims of this study were to determine the frequency and type of significant events by using short-term home event recordings of ...

The purpose of this follow-up study was to examine the effect of infant sex on changes in and differences between parents' reports of infant care self-efficacy and parenting and marital satisfaction from 4 months to 12 months after the birth of their first child. A convenience sample of 32 couples ...

The impact of dense traffic on the breeding success in pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca) was studied using roadside nest-boxes. Nest site selection and breeding success of flycatchers were observed in relation to the distance from the road. The number of occupied territories was no higher closer to the road than ...

We report a 3-month-old boy who suffered an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. During resuscitation, the medical team was informed that he was receiving hydrocortisone treatment. The possibility of adrenal insufficiency with hyperkalemic cardiac arrest prompted the administration of calcium, which resulted in the return of spontaneous circulation. The infant's diagnosis of ...

One-year-old infants (N = 62) and their mothers and fathers were observed in free play and teaching sessions in order to examine parents' emotional availability and the infant's emotional competence. Mothers were more emotionally available than fathers, and infants exhibited more effortful attention with mothers than with fathers. Similar relations ...

BACKGROUND: We describe a successful demonstration that repeated early deprivation of parental care (ED), as used to study effects of early life stress in rats, can be performed in a primate and that it constitutes an early life stressor. METHODS: Seven breeding pairs of marmoset monkeys each provided control twins ...

To determine the responsiveness of new fathers and non-fathers toward infant cues, we exposed fathers and non-fathers to infant cries and to control stimuli and we measured affective, heart-rate, and endocrine responses, including salivary testosterone and cortisol and plasma prolactin concentrations prior to and after cry presentations. We found that ...

OBJECTIVE: To ascertain the effectiveness of an individualized multidisciplinary residential programme for managing young unsettled infants and whether changes in unsettled behaviour were maintained. METHODS: One hundred and nine clients of a Tresillian residential unit with singleton infants aged less than 20 weeks were studied before, during and after intervention. ...

The jurisdiction of the Hannover Institute of Legal Medicine recently experienced an unusually high incidence of lethal child neglect, with three cases in a 5-month period in 1999. Case 1: A girl received an inappropriate and inadequate diet of tea and oatmeal. The child was never breastfed, nor did it ...

The incidence of SIDS has decreased by 40% since the Back to Sleep campaign was initiated. However, the rate of SIDS in the District of Columbia continues to be approximately double the national rate. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence and determinants of prone sleeping among ...

Recent intervention for young children has included parent training. The premise for this training is based in research on parent-child interaction. However, these studies have focused on white, middle-class families. More recent research suggests that not all cultures follow the same pattern. This study explored the relationship between attention regulation, ...

We investigated a possible influence on birth weight in Turner's syndrome of many clinical, hormonal, genetic and immunogenetic variables. We considered 97 patients with Turner's syndrome. Patients with parents with identical GM (Gamma heavy chains Marker) phenotype had a significantly lower birth weight than those with parents with different GM ...

OBJECTIVE: To examine, in a prospective study, whether maternal stress during pregnancy is related to infant temperament. METHOD: Self-report data on various aspects of prenatal stress were collected from nulliparous women in early pregnancy. Infant temperament was measured at 3 and 8 months by direct observation and by parent report. ...

The authors sought to apply evidence from research to nursing practice. Research about infant states, cues, and behaviors was presented to a birthing center nursing staff and expectant parent class instructors. Posttest results indicated that the staff's knowledge and skill in interpreting infant behavior for parents increased after an educational ...

The roles of person familiarity and parental involvement in 3.5-month-old infants' sensitivity to the dynamic emotion expressions of others were explored. In the home, parental facial/vocal expressions (happy, sad, angry) were videotaped, and measures of parent-infant involvement were obtained. In the laboratory, 32 infants alternately viewed their mother and father ...

OBJECTIVE: In June 2000, Oregon implemented a citizen-initiated ballot measure that grants adult adoptees access to their birth records, which contain their birth parents' identifying information. Because other states are considering similar policy changes, the authors explored whether Oregon's new law is meeting the information needs of adoptees. METHODS: Birth ...

Infertility and its treatment are increasingly viewed as public issues as well as a private concern. Treatments such as IVF draw on public resources and pose psychological and ethical dilemmas for the community. The current paper integrates findings from a prospective longitudinal study that assessed the quality of parenting in ...

METHOD: We studied mother-infant, father-infant and mother-father interaction in 32 families with an excessively crying infant and in 30 control families. The group with excessive criers was divided further into subgroups of severe colic (n=13) and moderate colic (n=19). The three dyads of the family were video-recorded when the infants ...

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the compliance of parents in purchasing iron-containing drugs for their infants. In addition, we looked for possible socioeconomic characteristics of the parents who prevent their infants from accessing these medications. DESIGN: All infants (4-12 months) whose parents bought (from January to August 1999 and from January to ...

BACKGROUND: Most maternity units have good practice protocols, advising that after stillbirth parents should be encouraged to see and hold their dead infant. Our aim was to assess whether adherence to these protocols is associated with measurably beneficial effects on the psychological health of mother and next-born child. This study ...

In many primate species a close attachment between mother and infant provides a secure base for the infant when the infant is frightened or under stress. In cooperatively breeding primates infant carrying is divided among several individuals in the group, with the mother often doing little more than nursing. In ...

With the complexity of technologies in medical centers today, family members are frequently confronted with situations that require decision making on behalf of a loved one. Some researchers have studied the needs of decision makers directly; however, the reality of asking opinions at the bedside of a dying patient makes ...

In this case study kangaroo care (KC) was facilitated for an adoptive mother and father who were planning to attend the birth of the infant they had arranged to adopt. Unexpectedly, the birth mother delivered at 27 weeks gestation. The infant was critically ill and required mechanical ventilation. However, in ...

The aim of this article is to generate knowledge about parents' participation in life-and-death decisions concerning their very premature and/or critically ill infants in hospital neonatal units. The question is: what are parents' attitudes towards their involvement in such decision making? A descriptive study design using in-depth interviews was chosen. ...

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether an educational intervention to change nursery practice would result in more inner-city parents placing their infants in the supine position for sleep. DESIGN: We conducted semistructured interviews at the 2-week health supervision visit with 1 convenience sample of parents before and a different convenience sample of ...

When citizens of Atlantic alliance countries are being asked by their elected leaders to suspend many of the fundamental rights of democracy in order to defend them, it is timely to consider the perils of the slippery slope that was opened up by the harvesting of human bones and tissue ...

A challenge facing neonatal health care providers is to combine technological intensive care for preterm infants with a sensitive and individualized approach facilitating neurobehavioral development while supporting parents in their roles as primary advocates and long-term caregivers. This exploratory study evaluated an individualized nursing intervention based on underlying assumptions of ...

Grief after the death of some or all multiples differs from mourning for a singleton loss in many important respects. A review of the unique features of grief for a multiple birth loss is followed by practical suggestions for empathic care. Cherished mementos and photos, and disposition options for deceased ...

AIM: To describe infant bed-sharing among Pacific families in New Zealand. METHODS: The data were gathered as part of the Pacific Island Families: First Two Years of Life (PIF) Study in which 1376 mothers were interviewed when their infants were six-weeks-old. Maternal reports of infant bed-sharing practices were assessed by ...

On May 2, 2002, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services notified CDC about an infant aged 10 months adopted from Russia who had culture-confirmed pertussis diagnosed. On April 8, the adoptive parents picked him up in the orphan ward at hospital A in Bryansk and noticed that ...

OBJECTIVE: To compare the parental stress in the families of 2 year old extremely low birthweight (ELBW) infants with that in control families, and to compare the stress of mothers with that of fathers. METHODS: The study population included all parents of ELBW infants (birth weight < 1000 g and ...

The purpose of this investigation is to assess family stress, coping, perceptions of their infant, and alterations in mood that may result from the hospitalization of their critically ill newborn infant. Eligible patients were those infants hospitalized in the Special Care Nursery (SCN) at Christiana Care Health Services, who were ...

Each twin and higher order multiple leads an extraordinary life before birth. The literature has revealed that the intrauterine environment differs for every multiple fetus and helps to shape the individuality of each multiple-birth child. From early in pregnancy, it appears that a multiple develops his or her own temperament ...

Psychodynamic psychotherapy with parents and infants addresses the relationship between them where there has been a disruption or distortion in the process of bonding. Often this is characterized by a repudiation of the state of infancy by the parent, and a negation of infantile needs in the baby and in ...

BACKGROUND: The federally administered Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a passive reporting system that receives domestic and foreign reports of adverse events that occur following immunization. This investigation explored whether routinely interviewing parents for follow-up of VAERS pediatric deaths would provide additional information important to vaccine safety. METHODS: ...

This article reports a non-randomized intervention study conducted in two market towns to find out whether participant-centred health education discussions improve parents' knowledge and actions concerning infant feeding. Following an initial quiz, parents of 8-week-old infants attended a discussion on weaning (intervention) or home safety (control). They were then asked ...

BACKGROUND: The quality of attachment of 127 Dutch 15-month-old infants to their primary caregivers was assessed using an abbreviated version of Ainsworth's Strange Situation. METHODS: In addition, infant-parent interaction was observed during a 12-minute series of instructional tasks both at home and in a lab setting. Infants were rated for ...

Infant procedural distress is largely understudied, and there is a dearth of empirically supported interventions in the child health psychology literature. This study examined nurse-directed distraction for reducing infant immunization distress. Ninety infants and their parents were randomly assigned to a distraction condition (i.e., nurses used stimuli to divert infants' ...

PURPOSE: To describe neonatal unit policies and practices regarding the holding of infants by parents. DESIGN: U.S. national cross-sectional descriptive survey. SAMPLE: Nurses representing 215 neonatal units providing regional-level (22 percent), community-level (45 percent), and intermediate-level (33 percent) care. MAIN OUTCOME VARIABLE: Proportion of respondents who reported neonatal intensive care ...

Sensorineural deafness and retinitis pigmentosa (RP) are the hallmarks of Usher syndrome (USH) but are also prominent features in peroxisomal biogenesis defects (PBDs); both are autosomal recessively inherited. The firstborn son of unrelated parents, who both had sensorineural deafness and RP diagnosed as USH, presented with sensorineural deafness, RP, dysmorphism, ...

The aim of this study was to evaluate a standardized sleep programme, i.e. a two-step variation of graduated extinction, where the child is first taught to fall asleep by him/herself at bedtime (first intervention) and 2 wk later also after night wakings (second intervention). The outcome after consultations with a ...

AIM: To examine the degree of agreement between the paediatrician's assessment and parental reporting of infants' development using a postal questionnaire. METHODS: The developmental status of 241 infants in the charge of 9 community paediatricians or discharged from one Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) was assessed by their parents 18 ...