Narrative Study of the Significance of Infertility and Its Treatment for Maternal Identity.

OBJECTIVE: To explore how women who experienced infertility and underwent fertility treatments constructed maternal identities after they successfully gave birth. DESIGN: Narrative qualitative study. SETTING: Finland, Scandinavia. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty-six previously infertile Finnish women who later conceived were recruited via social media, health clinics, and relevant informal support organizations. METHODS: Narrative analysis was used to process written accounts and individual episodic interviews with each of the 26 women. RESULTS: Four different identity stories emerged from the data: Fractured Maternity, Pursuing Maternity, Learning Maternity, and Discovering Maternity. Infertility, its treatment, and childbirth were narrated as turning points in the participants' life courses, but the significance of these turning points for maternal identity varied across the four stories. CONCLUSION: These findings have important implications for nursing practice. Health care professionals should be aware of the effects of previous long-standing infertility on the subsequent experience of motherhood so they can provide women with understanding, sufficient support, and appropriate interventions throughout the transition to motherhood.

The difficulty of being a professional, a parent, and a spouse on the same day: Daily spillover of workplace interactions on parenting, and the role of spousal support.

Designing parenting interventions and preventions requires knowledge on the factors and processes that shape parenting behaviors. Using data collected over 10 days, during the last hour of work and before going to bed, this study examined the spillover of interpersonal work stresses into positive and negative parenting behaviors. Data were collected among 103 couples who had at least one child between the age of one and eight years. Of particular interest was the role of received emotional spousal support as a moderator of stress spillover. Dyadic variants of multilevel models were used to analyze the data. The results showed that on days on which mothers or fathers reported stressful interpersonal interactions in the workplace, they also reported less positive parenting behaviors. In addition, mothers reported more negative parenting behaviors on days characterized by these kinds of work experiences. Mothers and fathers were found to report more positive parenting behaviors, and mothers less negative parenting behaviors, on the days on which they received more spousal support. Received spousal support also moderated spillover of work stress into parenting behaviors and this finding was found to be gender-specific: for mothers, support enhanced spillover into positive behaviors, and for fathers, it enhanced spillover into negative parenting behaviors.