Related Experiment Videos
Mothers' ideas about their role in feeding their high-risk infants
1Department of Children's Health, School of Nursing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 27599-7460, USA. thoyre@email.unc.edu
Objective:
To describe how mothers of preterm infants who are learning to nipple feed view their own and their infant's role in the feeding process.
Design:
Descriptive, comparative study.
Setting:
Two neonatal intensive-care units (NICU) in the Midwest.
Participants:
A convenience sample of 22 mothers of very-low-birth-weight infants.
Main Outcome Measures:
Interviews were rated for mothers' level of thinking about their co-regulatory role in their infants' feeding on a 6-point scale. The higher the score the more flexible, contingent, adaptive, and reflective the mother's thinking is regarding her infant's and her own behavior during feeding. High and low scores were compared using paired t tests.
Results:
The co-regulation scores ranged from 1 to 6, with a mean score of 3.3 (SD = 1.4). Mothers scoring higher on the co-regulation measure were significantly older and their infants were younger gestationally at birth. Their infants tended toward having been in the NICU for a longer period of time and spending more days on oxygen.
Conclusions:
Understanding feeding from the parents' perspective can guide clinicians as they support the development of parents' feeding skills. Intervention, rather than beginning with how to feed, may need to begin with how to take the infant's perspective, how to explore infant behavior that is novel, and ways of viewing the process of feeding as co-regulated.