Objective: To explore parents' perception of skin-to-skin care with their preterm infant who is on assisted ventilation, and to elucidate factors influencing the decision to continue or discontinue skin-to-skin care.
Design: Naturalistic inquiry, using open-ended, transcribed and audiotaped face-to-face and telephone interviews.
Setting: Tertiary neonatal care setting and homes of parents.
Participants: Eight mothers and one father who participated in skin-to-skin care.
Interventions: Two 60-minute skin-to-skin care sessions.
Results: Three themes emerged: (a) ambivalence of parents toward skin-to-skin care, including subthemes of yearning to hold the infant and apprehension to do so; (b) need of a supportive environment; and (c) special quality of the parent-infant interaction, including subthemes of intense connectedness and active parenting. Perceptions of apprehension, need for a supportive environment, and active parenting differed between parents who continued skin-to-skin care during their infants' hospitalization and parents who did not. Three of the four parents who discontinued skin-to-skin care in the hospital resumed when their infants were home.
Conclusions: Differences in narratives of parents highlighted the importance of individualizing the skin-to-skin experience to the needs of parent and infant. Parents who resumed skin-to-skin care at home valued the experience while their infant was hospitalized but needed intervention to alleviate their apprehension, enhance their feeling of autonomy, and modify the environment.