Emmi Suonpera

Project title

Parents’ experiences of parenting their child in transition to adolescence following extremely preterm birth

Project description 

The EPICure studies are national birth cohorts in the UK established to describe survival and later life outcomes following extremely preterm birth. EPICure2 cohort was established in 2006 for babies born at 22-26 weeks of gestation to mothers resident in England to determine any changes in line with advances in practice. EPICure2 at 11 years of age (EPICure2@11) will re-evaluate key psychological, medical and family outcomes at an important phase of the participants’ and their families lives –the transition to adolescence and secondary education. My PhD project is a concurrent mixed methods study exploring parents’ experiences of parenting their child in transition to adolescence following extremely preterm birth using standardised validated measurements routinely collected as part of the EPICure2@11 Study together with qualitative semi-structured interviews with the parents about their experiences at the time their child starts secondary school. Exploring these issues will contribute to identifying challenges of bringing up an extremely preterm child and key issues and anxieties facing families of extremely preterm children as they transition to adolescence, and to determine whether these differ to experiences of parents of full term born infants of the same age.

Start date

08/2017

Primary supervisor 

Prof Neil Marlow

Based at

Rockefeller Building

Links

ORCID
Research Gate