Introduction: Parental participation in the care of and support to premature infants is the main factor in accelerating health improvement and growth of infants in the neonatal unit. Many factors are associated with this participation, whose investigation provides appropriate contexts for parental participation. Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the participation of mothers...

Introduction Cultural innovations and child care practices and, importantly, the dynamic social values and ideologies that legitimize them, shift quite rapidly relative to evolutionary-based changes in fundamental infant biology. This raises the possibility that widely recommended infant care practices can be at odds with the human infant’s biological, psychological and emotional needs and expe...

Crying is a common, normal occurrence in a healthy infant. However, crying is one of the primary reasons parents seek health care for their infant child (Barr, 199 Many parents find inconsolable crying to be particularly difficult because the use of soothing techniques to comfort the infant seems futile. Parents also may view infant crying as a negative reflection on their ability to parent, in...

In many primate species a close attachment between mother and infant provides a secure base for the infant when the infant is frightened or under stress. In cooperatively breeding primates infant carrying is divided among several individuals in the group, with the mother often doing little more than nursing. In these species it is not clear which individual would best serve as a secure base for...

We apply a biopsychosocial conceptualization to attention development in the 1st year and examine the role of neurophysiological and social processes on the development of early attention processes. We tested whether maternal behavior measured during 2 mother-child interaction tasks when infants (N = 388) were 5 months predicted infant medial frontal (F3/F4) EEG power and observed attention beh...

Background: This cross-sectional study was designed to explore the impact of the availability of maternity care services on the int~Ult mortality rates in nonmetropolitan (rural) counties in Florida. Methods: We evaluated the sufficiency of physicians providing maternity care in each rural county. We then constructed a mathematical model to compare physician availability with the infant mortali...

OBJECTIVES The goals of this study were to assess: (a) the involvement of fathers and mothers in overall and nighttime infant caregiving; (b) the links between paternal involvement in infant care and infant sleep patterns during the first 6 months. METHODS Fifty-six couples recruited during their first pregnancy, participated in the study. After delivery (1 and 6 months), both parents complet...

Most knowledge of parent-offspring relations in mammals is derived from studies of mother-infant interactions. Male parental care has been less well studied. We explored maternal and paternal behavior of the California mouse, Peromyscus californicus. Six pairs of parents and their young were videotaped continuously for 12 hours/day, on alternate days from Days 1 to 31 postpartum. Males exhibit ...