Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
is also an extension of the grandiose image that the mother
posses of herself. The child, fruit of her fantasy, has to be perfect
and realize all the underlying desires of the parents.
� The desire to renew old relationships – therefore the child is seen
as a potential, able to renew lost ties and affection of infancy,
what happens when a child seems to substitute a brother, a
father or an already deceased friend. Thus, this child seems to
have magical powers, in the sense that faces the power of
remaking old relationships, to deny the passage of time and the
pain provoked by death and disappearance. It seems like
transference of feelings and unconscious relationships from the
parents to the child.
Conclusions
The mother possesses communicative abilities that allow her to
answer adequately to her baby, and it is undeniable that the
newborn possesses, also, a precocious ability to actively relate with
the environment, controlling his own behaviour and the one of his
mother. These "abilities" are complementary, establishing between
them a transactional and evaluative dialectics being specific of each
díade.
More and more, the father has an active role being requested to
emotionally support his mate in the pregnancy and after childbirth,
and, today, the beneficial effect of this afectional support to the
mother and the fetus are recognized, as well as the increasing
acceptance of the pregnancy and the baby, more positive
experiences of the childbirth and greater availability for the
maternal breast-feeding. The father must be present in the pre and
pos natal appointments.
The consistency and the constancy of parental care to the child, the
adjusted interaction parent-child and the safe bonding of the child
to the parents are crucial factors for the psychic and social
development of the child, with repercussions through all her life
cycle.
When a baby is born, a mother and a father are also born.
The health professionals, through the knowledge they withhold,
constitute a pillar of reference to the parents who look for help in
the process of adaptation to their real child. Their capacity to
involve the parents in the nursing care during pregnancy, in
conjunction with the inherent abilities due to their profession, are an
added value to help the parents to establish the bonding process.
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