The Development of Rooming-in at Yale *

The term "rooming-in" refers to "a hospital arrangement for maternity patients wherein a mother and her newborn are cared for together in the same unit of space. However, its meaning reaches beyond physical facilities and signifies an attitude in maternal and infant care and a general plan of supportive parental education which are based on the recognition and understanding of the needs of each mother, infant, and family. It is a plan to maintain natural mother-infant relationships, to reinforce the potentialities of each mother and infant, and to encourage the family unit. From this broad point of view, then, rooming-in is not to be viewed merely as a specific plan for space arrangement or as a particular kind of equipment or organization, but rather as an integrated, interdepartmental program of professional assistance which is aimed to help parents achieve happy family unity and warm parent-child relationships. Such a program is developed through physician counseling, nursing procedure, personnel assignment, and hospital arrangement which, though they may vary in detail, are all based on this broader, deeper concept of the meaning of rooming-in.""5 The foregoing statement defines the aims of the first rooming-in programns to be initiated in the United States. The definition was agreed upon in 1950 by representatives of medical centers in which rooming-in plans were in operation or in prospect. Active planning for rooming-in had begun in the early '40's at George Washington University,'7 in Detroit under the sponsorship of the Cornelian Corner,tu and at Yale University,'0 and interest was gradually extending to other institutions. The first scattered outcroppings of interest probably bore some relation to a series of interinstitutional and interdisciplinary meetings beginning in the late '30's concerning psychological aspects of child behavior and factors that favor or hinder healthy emotional development. Child care methodology thus came under review. Pediatric emphasis at that time was principally on regulations for physical care of children with little regard for psychological considerations. The selected group of child psychiatrists, psychologists, pediatricians, social scientists, and educators in these meetings shared the opinion that insistent strictness of routines in infant and child care played a role in the development of some of the emotional disturbances of childhood.