Coping Strategies in the Hospital

Abstract

So far, we have highlighted how mothers’ appraisals of the newborn intensive care crisis can influence their well-being and predict their child’s development. But appraisals that may help parents in their pursuit of meaning and mastery are not the same as their deliberate efforts to cope with the stresses of this event—in other words, their coping strategies. Our analysis would be incomplete if we ignore the many ways in which these parents consciously try to mitigate the stresses of their child’s hospitalization. In this chapter, we summarize what we learned about the nature, determinants, and the short and longer term effects of mothers’ initial coping strategies.