Parenting Stress and Childhood Impairment

As neonatal intensive care has evolved, mortality and serious morbidity in survivors were the initial concerns and remain issues still today for those children born at borderline viability.¹ It was also recognized that children who survive without major morbidities still have a wide variety of high frequency but less-severe impairments of cognitive, behavioral, and motor function.² More recently, we have become equally concerned that simply measuring performance against normative data or comparison children born at term may give a fallacious view of outcome that is unnecessarily over-pessimistic. Recent studies have concerned outcomes for children and their families in functional terms that reflect the impact that these impairments have on day-to-day life. This in turn may affect our own perceptions of these conditions.

Abbreviations: VLBW, Very low birthweight