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'I Did Not Know We Could Exercise This Small Premature Baby': Challenges Experienced by Parents While Implementing
Manasa Kolibylu Raghupathy1, Selim Jahangir2, Sonia Khurana3
1Department of Physiotherapy, Manipal College of Health Professions, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, Karnataka, India.
Insights
Parents face significant challenges implementing early intervention for preterm infants at home, including infant handling fears and time management issues. Understanding these parental perspectives is crucial for successful home-based care programs.
Area of Science:
- Neonatal care
- Parental support
- Early intervention programs
Background:
- Preterm birth presents significant stress for parents and infants.
- Parental involvement in care improves infant development and parent-infant bonding.
- Low parental adherence to intervention programs is a persistent challenge in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) and home settings.
Purpose of the Study:
- To identify challenges faced by new parents in implementing early intervention programs for preterm infants during the transition from hospital to home.
- To understand parents' perspectives on early intervention for their infants born preterm.
Main Methods:
- Ten parents of preterm infants, trained in early intervention, were interviewed using semistructured, in-depth interviews.
- Interviews were transcribed, translated, and analyzed thematically using ATLAS.ti software.
- Thematic analysis identified overarching challenges through deductive and inductive coding.
Main Results:
- Five key themes emerged: navigating early parenthood, nurturing infant resilience, informed caregiving, time mastery for efficiency, and balancing caregiving equity and flexibility.
- Parents expressed fear in handling preterm infants due to low birth weight and size.
- Time constraints, altered sleep, and infant stress behaviors posed challenges to program adherence, with observed gender differences in home program continuation.
Conclusions:
- Parents encounter significant challenges in providing home-based early intervention for preterm infants.
- Key issues include maternal role adjustment, family support needs, infant handling difficulties, exercise adherence, and time management.
Background:
Preterm birth is a highly stressful experience for both parents and infants. Parental participation in care enhances developmental outcomes, fosters parent-infant interactions and builds parental confidence. However, low parental adherence has always been a challenge in the successful implementation of intervention programs both in the NICU and at home. It is imperative to understand parents' perspectives and view the challenges that they experience through their lens while providing early intervention to their infants born preterm. This study is aimed at identifying new parents' challenges when implementing early intervention programs for their infants during the transition from hospital to home.
Methods:
Ten parents of preterm infants trained to administer early intervention programs in the NICU and at home were recruited during their infants' 3-month follow-up. Semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted until data saturation. The audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed and translated into English. Thematic analysis, using ATLAS.ti Version 8.0 software, identified overarching challenges through deductive and inductive coding.
Results:
Data analysis identified five recurring themes: (1) navigating early days of parenthood, (2) nurturing resilience in infant care, (3) supporting infants through informed caregiving, (4) maximizing efficiency in infant care through time mastery and (5) balancing equity and flexibility in caregiving. Parents expressed fear of handling their infants born preterm because of their low birth weight and small size. Time constraints, changing sleep patterns and daily routines make it difficult for mothers to adhere to exercise programs. Parents also face challenges when infants exhibit stressful behaviour. Furthermore, gender differences were observed, with fathers often not continuing the program at home.
Conclusions:
The study highlights parents' main challenges when providing early intervention for infants born preterm at home. It emphasizes issues related to maternal roles, family support and difficulties in infant handling, exercise and time management.
Trial Registration:
ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: CTRI/2020/09/027994.
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