Experiences of Maternal Love and Paternal Love When Preterm Infants Were Held Skin to Skin and Wrapped in Blankets: —Differences between

Abstract

Aims:

At The National Hospital in Oslo, Norway, a comparison was made between parents' rated experiences of maternal/paternal love when holding their preterm infants skin to skin (kangaroo), as compared to holding their infants wrapped in blankets.

Subjects:

The sample consisted of 185 parents, including 103 mothers and 82 fathers who in the hospital had held their preterm infants in two different ways.

Methods:

The method consisted of a clinical structured interview with closed-ended questions. In respons to the questions the parents had to choose a point from 1 to 8 where the anchoring point 1= no degree, and the anchoring point of 8= extreme degree. The Wilcoxon Signed Rank test (one sample test) was chosen to test significant differences between two variables within the group of mothers, also within the group of fathers.

Findings/Conclusion:

Results demonstrated that both mothers and fathers rated their experiences of love significantly higher when holding their infants skin to skin than when holding their infants wrapped in blankets (differences between two types of holding: mothers p= 0.0002, fathers p= 0.0001). When holding their infants skin to skin, no significant differences were found between the fathers' and the mothers' rated love (p= 0.26). Notably, both mothers and fathers rated their experiences of love as significantly lower when finding their infants as being less physically attractive when initially seeing them. This study may be a preliminary study for another measurement of parental love.