Maternal care: a health prevention strategy to develop healthy people

Abstract

After the first year of experience of the Center for Supporting the Family Health (CSFM), an analysis of the main concerns or symptoms was made. In the children’s population, it was observed that there are difficulties related to language, learning, behavior, and bonding. In adults, difficulties related to autonomy to deal with health/illness, body and conflict resolution were observed. Based on guidelines of Primary Care, an intervention was developed to deal with complaints from the weak links that constitute parental relationships, which lead to consequences for the development of subjects. To this end, we created the motherly care group, which is the activity of the child care that provides necessary care and emotional support for a healthy neurodevelopment. This is an educational-therapeutic group. It was observed a change of the participating mothers in relation to education and placement of boundaries, elaboration of family conflicts, reflection on their relationship with their parents, and improvement on listening and binding. However, in the babies, there was a better binding and acceptance of maternal touch and limits, greater sense of peace, and improvement on neuropsychomotor skills. The challenge is to deal with mothering care with subjects that were little or that were not held at all by their mothers. These are vulnerable subjects, little autonomous, and with great difficulty in establishing relationships guided by trust and security. At many moments, mothers are the ones who feel the holding action, redefining their first bonds, recovering the act of playing and the fantasy. It is believed that the mother-subject change can be achieved through the transformation of the mother-infant relationship, which will be decisive in shaping the subject-baby and allowing the redefinition of family relationships, producing health.