| Drug use is a significant risk factor for the mother/infant dyad and can significantly impact a woman's ability to parent her infant. These mothers may have difficulty developing a healthy parent-child relationship and therefore should be considered a vulnerable group in our society. The purpose of this descriptive study was to describe the factors that are associated with vulnerability in parenting for the cocaine-exposed mother. Two research questions were developed to elicit factors that create vulnerability in parenting for the women and to determine how these factors impact her parenting. The convenience sample (N = 11) was drawn from one community hospital, a university-based teaching hospital and an outpatient addiction treatment facility. All mothers were recovering from cocaine addiction. The study was based on a conceptual analysis of vulnerability and an ecological model of parenting (Belsky, 1984). A Grounded Theory methodology (Straus & Corbin, 1990) was used to analyze the interview data. Two global themes emerged to identify factors that affected parenting in the sample: personal/psychological and environmental /contextual issues. Several subthemes have emerged from the interview data that provided the support for the two global themes. These factors were: self-worth, maternal identity, isolation; and chronic life stress. In addition, five issues emerged in this analysis of the interview data that described problems in parenting for these women when they were using cocaine: lack of structure (N = 7), abandonment (N = 6), and impatience/anger (N = 5), knowledge of parenting (N = 4) repeating dysfunction patterns from family of origin (N = 2). Mother/infant dyads (N = 8) in the sample consented to being videotaped while feeding the baby and teaching the baby a task. The videotapes were analyzed using the NCAST Feeding and Teaching Scale (Barnard & Eyers, 1979; Sumner & Spitz, 1994). No mother/infant dyad scored below the 10 percentile established by the normative data base. Additional research is needed to support these findings. This study provides a better understanding of the sources contributing to vulnerability in the parenting role for cocaine-exposed mothers and will assist nurses to provide improved care for these mother/infant dyads. |
