Stress for families today

Rapid changes in family life have created enormous challenges and pressures on developing families - divorce, two working parents, disappearance of the extended family, unclear cultural values for our children's future, poorly defined support systems for stressed families, inadequate substitute care when both parents work-all contribute to an anxious atmosphere for young families. Parents who must return to work „too early”︁ (and we have no established standards yet for what this means to either child or adult development) seem to grieve about the loss of the relationship with the developing child. They may even set up defenses against making a strong and painful attachment. They may not become involved in the child's development in a way that will foster their own development as nurturing adults. The grieving and the necessary defenses against it are predictable and must be mitigated in order to foster nurturing adults within the family. Children must be provided with caring, intensely involved adults in order to assure their optimal future development. We must provide them and their parents with adequate substitute care. This paper suggests adjustments at the industrial level that must be made to foster parental involvement and to assure positive outcomes for future generations.     

Presence and television.

Film and a number of emerging entertainment technologies offer media consumers an illusion of nonmediation known as presence. To investigate the possibility that television can evoke presence, 65 undergraduate students were shown brief examples of rapid point‐of‐view movement from commercially available videotapes on a television with either a small screen (12 inches [30.5 cm], measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches [116.8 cm]). Participants' responses were measured via a questionnaire and a computer‐based recording of arousal (electrodermal activity). Viewers of both televisions reported an enjoyable sense of physical movement, excitement, involvement, and a sense of participation. Furthermore, as predicted, participants who watched the large screen television thought the movement in the scenes was faster, experienced a greater sense of physical movement, enjoyed the movement to a greater extent, found the viewing experience more exciting, and were more physiologically aroused. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Preventive intervention with infants and families: The NBAS model

A model for preventive intervention based on the use of the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) is presented, and the conceptual framework underlying this approach is made explicit. The approach is based on the assumption that the neonatal period presents clinicians with a unique opportunity to influence parent-infant relations positively from the beginning. It is argued that especially under conditions of stress, this infant-centered but family-focused form of intervention can serve to prevent the compounding of problems that may occur when the caregiving environment is unable to adjust to the needs of the young infant. The aim of the NBAS-based approach is to sensitize parents to the communication cues and the unique adaptive capacities of their infants. It is the individualized nature of the NBAS-based approach that places it outside the domain of main-effects treatment modalities and renders it responsive to the particular needs of individual infants and their families. The model of intervention described herein is based on the development of a supportive therapeutic relationship between clinicians and parents and as such may serve as the first stage in a comprehensive follow-up program of support for infants and families. Guidelines for clinicians using the NBAS in clinical settings that follow from these assumptions are provided.     

The Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (BNBAS)

Summary The Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment attempts to capture the behaviors of the neonate as he defends himself from intrusive, negative stimuli, and controls interfering motor and autonomic responses in order to attend to important social and nonsocial stimuli. In order to conceptualize the 26 behavioral items and 20 reflex scores, four clusters or typologies have been identified which help to reduce the data for analytic purposes with small numbers of subjects. So far few long-term validation studies have been completed, although the scale is in use in many different areas, such as obstetrical medication, predicting to neurological deficits, cross-cultural differences, and with low birth weight infants.This work was supported by grant # 7634-4 of the Grant Foundation, New York.This material appears in expanded form in Osofsky, J. (ed.),Handbook on Infancy, Wiley Interscience, 1977, in press.