Objectives: This study assessed, through retrospective reporting, parent-child bonding of children with congenital heart disease (CHD) during their own childhood, and who have subsequently become mothers themselves. It also assessed their current psychosocial wellbeing.
Method: Mothers with CHD varying from post-operative transposition of the great arteries to non-operated aortic stenosis were compared to healthy mothers on retrospectively reported parent-child bonding and current self-esteem, adult attachment, coping with motherhood, and child-rearing practices. Sixteen mothers with CHD (mean age 31.4 years, SD=5.5) were recruited through a tertiary centre. A comparison sample of 48 healthy mothers (mean age 37.5 years, SD=4.6) were recruited from the community. All participants completed a set of questionnaires assessing their experiences in childhood, adulthood, and as current mothers.
Results: A series of independent measures t-tests with Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons found no significant differences between the two groups for retrospective child-parent bonding measures. There was a slight trend for mothers with CHD to score higher on both mother and father care in their retrospective reports of received parenting. Mothers in the CHD group also scored higher on current attachment anxiety, and these differences were significant at α=.05, but became non-significant after Bonferonni adjustment. There was a tendency for mothers with CHD to score higher on current emotion-focused coping, and lower on problem-focused coping; however, these differences were not significant.
Conclusion: These trends indicate that further studies with a larger sample of mothers with CHD are required to accurately determine the health care needs of mothers with CHD.