Infantile Colic and Its Relationship

¶ … infantile colic and its relationship to parent stress has been a hotly debated topic since the 1980s. Many believe that Colic related parent stress is the eventual cause of many later psychological and parent child problems. However, no effective and cost efficient solution has been proposed because there is relatively little data and heavy analysis done on the subject post 1985. infantile colic is defined as the process by which a baby persistently cries because of inconsistent sleep and awake cycles. The problem of infantile colic, which is persistent in almost a quarter of infants is that it causes undue stress upon parents. The hope of the study conducted in "Reducing Parenting Stress in Families with Irritable Infants" is to find out if using nurse visitations will significantly reduce parent stress. The significance of this study is that if successful it could offer an efficient and effective option by which parents can reduce their stress and manage their child through alternative methodology. This critique will look at the entirety of the study and evaluate both its intent, procedure, and conclusions.

The first and most important question to ask is whether or not this study fulfilled a need within the parenting and childcare field. In this field, Dr. Keefe and her associates did an admirable job explaining the need for this research study. Not only does she emphasize the wide reach of this problem, but her indepth discussion of research history and identification of the problem clearly emphasized how important further research on infantile colic actually was. The authors create the need through both explicitly explaining the depth of the problem and also by creating a vaccum surrounding the problem. It is a combination of these two factors that makes this study a need area.

The problem with the conclusions of this study is that many different outliers could significantly skew the results of this study. The authors state that overall parenting stress is reduced significantly over time. Although in the long-term the nursing intervention has been shown that therapeutic implications exist. However, the true value of nurse intervention may be significantly lower than this article credits. First, the research methodology is inconclusive and not nearly broad enough. By having only two test sites the study does not have broad application to a large demographic. It only proves that within isolated circumstances nursing intervention could have an incremental affect. Furthermore, this study only depends on 121 families, although this total appears to be diverse, it not only is a relatively small sample size, but it also is not randomly stratified across the test site, making it much less accurate.

Another main problem with its research design is that it measures nursing intervention only against no treatment or intervention at all. This implies that this test only validates a non-quantifiable measure of the effects of having nursing intervention. The test parameters should have included a closer look at altnerative measures as part of the control group. Without doing so there are several implications on the result. First, there is no accurate method of quantifying the research results by using other methods as barometers. Second, without a useful secondary test there is no way to know if using nursing intervention is at all efficient. If for instance other minute changes to infantile behavior or parenting patterns can have a dramatic impact on the overall stress level of parents, then it would significantly alter the interpretations of the results from the study.

In the context of the research study the results are significant because it alters our current understanding of infantile colic and its implications for parents. The best methodology practice that they implemented was measuring the results in both long and short-term implications. The results show that even though in the short-term, successive stress level decreased for both the control party as well as the actual test group, overall in the long-term, the test group showed significant long-term solvency. In general the research shows that nursing intervention does have an impact on parenting stress and thus gives light into a method to solve the problem of chronic parenting stress from infantile colic. The actual impact on nursing practice however may be very minor, this is because treatment as outlined by this study would be extremely hard to impose in a non-controlled environment. Not only would the personal costs to the parents be significant, but also actual assistance and training of nurses to apply these theories would be hard to implement. In general this study is important because it will be the first in a series of examinations on how nursing practice can shed light on the infantile colic problem. This study starts to question the specific practices that might take affect to help parents dealing with such problems, but there is little that they can actually do to prevent the problems experienced within most households. In order to make the implications of this study have solid impact on the lives of households, more subsequent research must be done to determine how to adapt the nursing intervention techniques to self application strategies for the parents.

In general this research effort should be done on a broader scale because the obvious wide application of infantile colic related parental stress means that a solution needs to be found. In order to have an actual conclusive understanding of this effect, a research study must look at several factors. First, if application of nursing intervention can actually solve parental stress than it must be proven on a wide scale with a multiple demographic study and application. Second, comparison of nursing intervention along with other proposed techniques will be extremely necessary in order to establish a quantifiable comparison between different value propositions to solve this problem. Without such a process, there is little conclusive value for the study because the results could be duplicated across many different application fields. Third, it must be conducted across different ethnic and geographic demographics because parental stress may impact different cultural mixes differently. This is evident because child rearing practice could be one of the biggest confounding variables in relation to parental stress.