| For parents, the experience of having a seriously ill newborn hospitalized for intensive care has been characterized, metaphorically, as an emotional roller-coaster ride which includes anticipatory grief: hoping for infant survival while simultaneously preparing for death. The metaphor of an emotional roller-coaster ride has not been empirically investigated. The relatively few studies of parent anticipatory grief used cross-sectional designs which relied on parent recollections of earlier emotional responses.;The purpose of the present study was to compare the anticipatory grief responses of mothers and fathers as they lived out their neonatal intensive care experiences, and to determine how their responses varied over time. Anticipatory grief was operationally defined by the following seven items on a valid and reliable anticipatory grief scale: feelings of sadness, anger, difficulty sleeping, change in appetite, preoccupation thinking or dreaming about the baby, irritability, and guilt.;Thirty-five mother-father pairs completed the instrument once during their infants' hospitalization and five mother-father pairs completed the instrument twice daily during all or part of their infants' hospitalization. Model comparisons using multiple linear regression were developed for longitudinalized cross-sections data from the 35 mother-father pairs, longitudinal data from the five mother-father pairs, and two cross-validation data subsets from the five mother-father pairs.;Maternal anticipatory grief significantly exceeded paternal anticipatory grief, over and above the effects of infant level of care (a measure of severity of illness), and duration of infant hospitalization. A significant curvilinear effect of time, for both mothers and fathers, over and above the linear effect of time on anticipatory grief was found for both parent couple samples and both cross-validation subsets. Three additional variables: death worry, feelings of helplessness, and uncertainty, were significantly related to anticipatory grief and were experienced by the majority of mothers and fathers.;These findings suggest that clinicians and researchers may want to restructure future approaches to practice and research design, taking into account the curvilinear nature of parents' emotional responses during this family crisis. |
