INFERTILITY AND EARLY PARENT-INFANT INTERACTIONS

Approximately 50% of infertile couples will become parents through pre gnancy or adoption, but they experience major difficulties while worki ng towards this goal. Infertility treatments are associated with physi cal pain and psychological distress, and adoption procedures are prolo nged and emotionally stressful. The extent to which these stressors al ter the parenting of these couples is not known. The purpose of this s tudy, therefore, was to examine the early parent-infant interactions i n infertile couples who become parents through pregnancy or adoption. Two groups of infertile couples (30 who achieved pregnancy and 21 who adopted) and a group of 19 couples without fertility problems were obs erved interacting with their infants twice, 7 to 21 days after the inf ant's arrival and a week later, at a time when both parents were at ho me. Their babies were between 9 days and 5 months of age. Behaviours o f the mother, father and infant: were recorded every 10 seconds, begin ning when the baby was picked up and ending when the baby was put down asleep or 11/2 hours had passed. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used t o compare the three groups over the observations, there were no differ ences between fertile and infertile biological parents. Adopted infant s showed more alertness, less sleeping, more smiles, and more looking than biological infants. Adoptive mothers spent less time as the sole interactor. Adoptive parents spent more time in playing with their inf ants and held and touched them less than did biological parents. Infer tility, therefore, does not appear to affect early parenting. In gener al, the amounts of behaviours exhibited by infer the biological parent s were very close to those of fertile parents. Differences in the beha viours of adoptive as compared to biological parents can best be expla ined as responses to the behaviours of their older infants, rather tha n as evidence of different parenting styles.