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Learning Objective 1: Describe the different forms of distress experienced by parents after preterm birth.
Learning Objective 2: Identify potential strategies for nurses and other health care providers to address parents' distress after preterm birth.
Design/methods: Exploring how parents talk about their distress can be accomplished through discourse analysis, a methodology that examines language through the lenses of social action and social contexts. Four couples were recruited whose infant was born at less than 32 weeks gestation and who experienced emotional distress when the child was at least 6 months old. In individual semi-structured interviews participants discussed their experiences of prematurity, distress, and parenting. In a second interview, participants reflected upon digital photographs they had taken to visually represent their distress.
Results: In preliminary analysis, participants minimized medical discourses and focused their constructions of distress on the failures of social support, the medicalization of the birth and childhood, and feeling different from other parents. Parents located distress in photographs of objects, places, and the premature child. Members of couples utilized similar and different discourses in their constructions, which illuminated their strengths and challenges in confronting their distress as a couple. Effective care of these vulnerable families should acknowledge these experiences and find ways to increase the effectiveness of social support and the responsiveness of clinicians to parents’ distress. Findings may help nurses ameliorate the negative effects of preterm birth in order to improve parenting and the emotional health of parents and premature children.