About this Research Topic

Background

There is growing recognition that how care is provided to birthing women and people across the childbearing continuum has a significant impact on emotional responses with long lasting consequences for parents, families and care providers. Poor and disrespectful maternity care is a key risk factor for a traumatic birth and post-traumatic stress disorder and its associated aftereffects - typically linked to fragmented models of maternity care and industrial birth practices. Conversely, meaningful, and needs-based relational care is a known protective factor. While continuity of care supports the cultivation of trusting relationships, acts of kindness, compassion, dignity, and respect, other models of care can also have a positive influence on experiences across the perinatal period. Therefore, attending to the emotional components of maternity care and practices that enhance perinatal experiences and outcomes is important.

For some women and birthing people, childbirth may be a ‘peak’ experience – an enhanced flow state, where women report a sense of timelessness or even transcendence. For a flow state to occur, women must paradoxically feel in control (emotionally safe) to ‘let go’ and surrender to the childbirth process, which requires sensitive and attuned care. However, as yet there are little insights into how women’s flow experiences can be enabled, and for different population groups. Moreover, parents who face more complex situations, such as those whose baby requires neonatal care, have experienced a perinatal loss, or are underserved (in research and within service provision) such as ethnic minorities, or those who face disadvantage and harm, need equitable and more specialized input to optimize positive emotional wellbeing and to reduce inequalities. Insights into how emotional wellbeing can be preserved and enhanced for these population groups is needed.

In this Research Topic, we welcome submissions that explore women and birthing people’s emotional and/or psycho-spiritual wellbeing including care provision and practices that enhance and promote positive emotional health throughout the perinatal period. Given pregnancy, birth and new parenthood is a heightened emotional experience, fraught with a mixture of feelings and complex social contexts, holding emotional health and wellbeing with the same esteem as physical is a vital component of health-enhancing care provision. Moreover, growing evidence in wider healthcare demonstrates that compassionate and empathetic care positively influences a wide range of outcomes across physical, emotional, mental and spiritual domains – which we want to explore in the context of maternity care. Our aim is to explore this understudied component of maternity care which centers a salutogenic, positive health focus on factors that support emotional health and wellbeing. Such an exploration will help address issues of dehumanized and disrespectful care, and to optimize positive outcomes for all.

The collection is open to research that centers emotional health and wellbeing across the perinatal period and has a clear and direct focus on service user experiences and/or outcomes. We are particularly interested in original research, systematic reviews, hypothesis/theory articles. Theoretical papers are of interest where theories have not previously been explored extensively in relation to maternity care such as exploring attachment theory within the midwife-mother context and/or research focusing on the physiological mechanisms of perinatal emotional wellbeing. Thematically, we welcome submissions related to:

• Exploring the qualities, approaches, care practices and/or the affect and impact of compassionate or empathetic maternity care.
• Exploring post-traumatic growth in relation the perinatal or childbirth experience – either from the perspective of those with pre-existing trauma prior to pregnancy or for those who have experienced birth trauma.
• Exploring and/or understanding the social, spatial, emotional qualities, attributes, and/or care practices that can facilitate a flow state during a positive birth.
• Identifying and addressing emotional needs during pregnancy, intrapartum or postnatal period .
• Exploring cultural components of emotional safety and safeness in the perinatal period including strategies, interventions and/or service reconfigurations.
• Empirical studies that explore the experiences, effectiveness and/or impact of different approaches to improving emotional intelligence and/or empathy in maternity professionals.
• Exploring the preparation for emotion-work (staff, students, women, parents) including self-awareness and an asset-based approach.
• Considering theories or approaches outside of current maternity care research and their application to emotional wellbeing within the perinatal period examples include but not exclusively; attachment theory, polyvagal theory, flow state etc.
• Empirical or theoretical studies related to the physiological mechanisms of emotional wellbeing in the perinatal period.
• Exploring the mother-midwife (or other maternity professional) relationship within a therapeutic context.
• Exploring emotional care and wellbeing in challenging circumstances such as parents experiencing premature births and neonatal admissions; perinatal loss; poor perinatal mental health; severe disadvantage (such as homelessness, incarceration) and loss of custody.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: perinatal care, emotionally-centred, empathetic care, pregnancy

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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