RESEARCH ARTICLE
Remembering the Chaos - But Life Went on and the Wound Healed. A Four Year Follow Up with Parents having had a Baby with Infantile Colic
Kajsa Landgren*, Anita Lundqvist, Inger Hallström
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 6
First Page: 53
Last Page: 61
Publisher ID: TONURSJ-6-53
DOI: 10.2174/1874434601206010053
PMID: 22655001
PMCID: PMC3362860
Article History:
Received Date: 7/11/2011Revision Received Date: 22/2/2012
Acceptance Date: 23/2/2012
Electronic publication date: 2/5/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Objective:
To elucidate parent´s experience of having had a baby with colic four years previously and of how the colic and care influenced the family in a long-term perspective.
Methodology and Participants:
A qualitative inductive follow-up study with 13 individual and one focus group interview including four parents. Altogether ten mothers and seven fathers representing 12 families, who had been interviewed when they were in the midst of the colicky period four years ago, were in the present study interviewed between December 2010 and May 2011. Parents’ narratives were analysed using content analysis.
Results:
Parent´s memories of the exhausting colic period were vivid, but when the colic had healed the family relationships also healed. Although it had taken longer time for some parents to attach to their child they now experienced a close relationship with their four year old child and felt confident in their role as parent. The colic scream was still unbearable and evoked negative feelings in the parents. Parents had decreased confidence in Child Health services and made suggestions for improvements in the health care approach. Most of all they wished for an effective treatment of infantile colic.
Conclusion:
The family relationships were healed and the colic left only few residual symptoms but parents still had decreased confidence in the Child Health Center. Consequently, there is a need to raise awareness to parents’ situation when having a child with infantile colic.
