Fathers Of Premature Babies Deal With More Stress Than Mothers

Fathers of premature kids are shown to have higher stress levels as compared to the mothers for up to two weeks till their child is taken home, shows a new US research. Researchers from the Northwestern Medicine conducted this research. For the very first time they took the father's stress levels into consideration, from the time when their baby is in the Neonatal ICU till the time the baby is taken home.

They chose 86 parents for this study to check their stress levels during this period with the help of salivary tests to fathom their cortisol level and with the help of paper surveys. They were tested a day before the children were taken home, then one, five and fourteen days after they were home with the babies. It was found that both mother and father had high levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva before the baby was discharged from the hospital.

However, this decreased greatly during the fourteen day period when the baby was taken home in the father. Mothers, on the other hand, had come to the point where it started.

It was also found that the stress levels of fathers on the basis of the salivary test were higher than what they reported. This meant that the fathers were not aware of the stress they were actually dealing with.

Garfield recommends both parents to help the father deal with the stress and help him gain confidence for the baby in NICU. This would ease the transition from hospital to home.

Though the research did not take the stress levels of parents with full-term babies, Garfield reported than even those parents experienced stress while taking their baby home. He suggested that all parents need to look for ways to deal with the stress and take time to relax.