Parenting Expectations, NICU Experiences, and Maternal Psychological Outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Infant neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) hospitalization increases maternal risk for psychological distress. However, no universal screening standards exist and predicting maternal risk remains challenging. Reconceptualizing maternal distress in relation to differences between parenting expectations and NICU experiences may illuminate commonalities across a range of experiences. PURPOSE: This study explored parenting expectation-experience differences (EEDs) among NICU mothers and assessed correlations between EED scores and psychological outcomes 1 to 5 years post-NICU hospitalization. METHODS: A 3-phase explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was used. Pearson's correlation coefficients were used to measure relationships between EED scores and maternal psychological outcomes. Reflexive thematic analysis of one-on-one, semi-structured interviews contextualized EED scores. RESULTS: Most participants (92.9%) reported negative EED scores, indicating NICU experiences fell short of parenting expectations. Significant inverse correlations were found between EED scores and maternal outcomes, including depression ( r = -0.25, P < .01), anxiety ( r = -0.25, P < .01) and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms ( r = -0.41, P < .001), and perceived parenting self-efficacy ( r = -0.28, P < .01). Major qualitative themes included unexpected versus prepared, lost parenting experiences, and surviving and thriving. Data synthesis contextualized EED scores and revealed key differences in meaning ascribed to unmet parenting expectations. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE AND RESEARCH: Preparing mothers for infant NICU hospitalization and creating a NICU parenting environment, which better supports mothers and their engagement in parenting tasks, may help to reduce differences between parenting expectations and NICU experiences. Further research is needed to elucidate the impacts of parenting EEDs in this population.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".