ABSTRACT
Each year, from 2% to 9% of newborn babies require specialized care in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The majority of these are babies born prematurely (before 37 weeks of age) and weigh less than 2,500 g (5 lb) at birth. Modern medical technology has doggedly pushed back the frontiers of viability so that as we enter the twenty-first century an increasing number of babies as young as 23 to 24 weeks gestation with weights as low as 500 g are surviving. Parents of all preterm babies confront unique problems engendered by the timing of the birth, a prolonged hospital stay, and distinctive patterns of behavior and development in the infant’s early years. In this chapter we review these problems and their effects on parents. In doing so, we focus on parent-infant interactions and relationships in these early years, but include some information on later development. In part, this emphasis reflects the fact that the infancy years have been the most intensively studied. Infancy is the time when these children are most different from others and most challenging to their parents. This review is selective rather than comprehensive and, aside from background history, concentrates on general themes of recent interest.
