Clinical StudiesImproving Interactions Between Substance-Abusing Mothers and Their Substance-Exposed Newborns
Section snippets
Purpose
The purpose of the current study was to determine whether teaching comforting and interacting techniques within 24 hours of delivery to substance-abusing mothers would improve mother-newborn interactions 48-72 hours after hospital discharge, as measured by the Nursing Child Assessment Feeding Scale (NCAFS).
Literature Review
Griffith (1988) found that many mothers who use cocaine experience guilt concerning the damage that their habit may have done to their infants. Some such mothers doubt their ability to cope with and meet the demands of their infants. When these insecure mothers are paired with irritable, easily overloaded, and unresponsive infants, the mothers often interpret the infants’ attempt to shut out external stimulation as personal rejection and blame the infants for rejecting them. This situation
Design
This study used intervention, control, and comparison groups in a pretest/posttest design.
Setting
The study was conducted in a 550-bed inner-city private hospital that serves a mostly indigent clinic population in northwest Ohio with approximately 1,800 deliveries each year. The target population was mothers attending the hospital’s prenatal clinic.
Participants
Three groups (intervention, control, and comparison), each containing 20 participants, 10 first-time mothers, and 10 mothers with more than one child, were
Maternal Characteristics
Almost one third of the women reported using THC only. More than two thirds of the women reported using a combination of drugs (i.e., alcohol with THC, cocaine, or both). Eight of the 40 participants (20%) in the intervention and control groups who initially reported they had not used drugs tested positive for cocaine and/or THC.
Newborn Characteristics
A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated a difference in gestational age among the groups (F = 11.57, p = .0001). Post hoc comparisons using the Tukey-HSD
Discussion
Marijuana (THC) was the drug most frequently used by mothers in the current study. These results are consistent with the 1990 National Institute on Drug Abuse Household Survey on drug abuse that found THC to be the most preferred drug, with cocaine being second. Other researchers have reported that women who use cocaine are likely to use other substances, such as alcohol and THC (Bergin et al., 1996, Bresnahan et al., 1991; Keith et al., 1989). Four mothers who tested positive for THC at
Summary
Teaching and demonstrating caregiving behavior was effective in helping substance-abusing mothers comfort their newborns, recognize their newborns’ cues, and develop ways to respond appropriately to their newborns’ needs during the early postpartum period. However, when mother and newborn behavior were considered separately, only maternal scores showed an improvement. Newborn scores showed the same direction of effect, but did not differ significantly. A comparison group was used to establish
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Cited by (20)
Developments in Nursing Practice to Address Substance Use in the Perinatal Period
2022, JOGNN - Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal NursingCitation Excerpt :Additionally, many people with SUD are distrustful of health care providers and often experience unstable housing or homelessness, which makes it challenging to retain these participants in research studies (Western et al., 2016). The earliest research conducted by nurses focused on studying the effect of interventions developed to promote attachment between mothers with SUD and infants (Donaldson, 1991; French et al., 1998). Several research teams reported judgmental attitudes among nurses toward mothers who used substances and a lack of knowledge by nurses (Gerace et al., 1995; Selleck & Redding, 1998) and nurse-midwives (Corse et al., 1995).
Caring, chaos and the vulnerable family: Experiences in caring for newborns of drug-dependent parents
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2019, Advances in Neonatal CareDo preventive interventions for children of mentally ill parents work? Results of a systematic review and meta-analysis
2017, Current Opinion in PsychiatryQuality of caregiving in mothers with illicit substance use: A systematic review and meta-analysis
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