Parent’s experiences of support during the baby time and changes in support between pregnancy and baby time.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23990/sa.82620Keywords:
family with children, maternity and child welfare clinic, support, questionnaire survey, follow-up studyAbstract
The earlier research evidence has shown that dif-ferent kind of support interventions are the effective ways to improve the health and well-being of families with children. The aim of this study is to describe the experience of support received by family with children from maternity and child welfare clinic and examine the factors in the connection to the experience of support. Furthermore, in this study a change in the experience of the support is examined between 30. pregnancy week and when the baby is ten months old. The data contains 106 families. The data were analyzed with statistical methods. Families were generally satisfied with the support they received from the welfare clinic. There were inadequate support experiences among mothers feeling difficult to tell about the family issues to outsiders or discussing about difficult things. In addition, mothers would have needed more support for the principles and practices of child rearing. Parents also felt that understanding the mental strain was inadequate. They would have needed more support for exercise and understanding of the change in sex life. The mothers who had no difficulties in talking about their family matters to an outsider estimated the support they received statistically significantly better. For the other parents, the level of support was statistically significantly better in relation to the level of education. The support was estimated to be better if the other parent had a university degree. Both mothers and other parents felt the support was stronger when the child was ten months old. The difference was statistically significant for the other parents. There is a need to implement support for families with children individually, according to their needs. Due to the small size of the data the results cannot be generalized to the whole clinic system, but they help to understand the need for developing sup-port. Further family research is needed to make the impact of preventive work visible, so that social and health services under pressure of change can be resourced in an appropriate manner.
