Volume 24, Issue 1
Chilean and german adolescent mothers with their babies in residential welfare institutions: Cultural differences or a shared vulnerability?
Abstract
This comparative and cross sectional study analyzes the quality on the dyadic interactions, child development, maternal depressive symptomatology and cultural variables in adolescents mother-infant dyads living in welfare institutions. Twenty dyads with children between 3 and 16,2 months are involved in the analysis, ten of them are Chilean and ten are German. The results show high depressive symptoms and low quality bonding mother-child in both groups and significant differences in child psychomotor development levels, with higher scores in Chilean children. There is also a significant and positive association between child development and the numbers of hours these children spend at nursery, implicating that alternative care is a positive function in the study group. There are no differences between cultural variables as expected so these results may be explained by a great impact of the psychosocial problems which both countries dyads share that influence the variables of this study.
Keywords
adolescent motherhood, early interactions, infant development, maternal depression, welfare support, culture