Kathryn Barnard’s Child Interaction Theory Essay

Summary

From birth, healthy child growth depends on the parent/caregiver reacting to the kid’s signals compassionately and reliably. That is what Dr. Kathryn Barnard dedicated her entire career to. She was a frontrunner in newborns’ mental health, mainly analyzing children’s social-emotional well-being throughout the first half of a decade of their lives. She was a well-known academic, educator, and inventor. Dr. Barnard discovered that rocking babies helped them gain weight and improve their motor and cognitive functions. Rocking chairs are the norm in today’s hospital nurseries and pediatric intensive care units (Willis et al., 2022). She discovered that the rocking movement helped babies gain weight and develop their motor and sensory functions. Nursing as a discipline is founded on what it entails, what nurses achieve, and how their performance is done. It is a distinct career that is autonomous from the medical field. It has got its particular level of information to give care.

Experiential Learning and Child Interaction Theory

The appointment of trained nurses happens to be one of the most important fundamentals for healthcare structures to discourse the varied needs of patients. Nursing edification methods’ most essential responsibilities are to provide higher education to nursing students and train clinical staff to deliver safe and not substandard patient care in the future. Nursing instructors have to implement innovative educational approaches to fully involve nursing learners in educational activities in research and vocational sets as a major stride toward this objective.

Mainly looking at neonatal care, the theoretical belief of experiential learning is an acute methodology. Experiential learning is a speculative tactic that focuses on the applicability of familiarity in learning while assimilating hypothetical and practical elements brought forth by the rocky chairs used in all pediatric care units. Child Interaction Theory was actively influenced by the need to understand how the environment affects the development course of families and children. Informative practices that specialists involved in indulging the mother-infant relationship were at the heart of learning. Experiential learning took place in the hospital, where Barnard started with analyzing disabled children and adults, moving on to the well-child activities.

The Main Concepts of the Theory

This nursing theory is considered to be a middle-range theory because it is expressive, predictive, and instructive, focusing specifically on parent-child interactions and acting as a bridge between research and practice. Its incredible effortlessness of perception application with broad levels of specificity makes it stand out as one of the most well-known and commonly applied middle-range theories (Risjord, 2018). Child interaction theory links to more extensive areas of neonatal care, like the improving health of infants and their families by psychologically focusing on mother-infant interaction.

The environment comprises five interconnected biological, mental, ecological, social, and spiritual aspects. Via layers numbering three of preventative care, the nurse’s role is to ensure the client-environment relationship is steady. Initial avoidance happens before the client experiences a stressor response; intermediate prevention arises after a patient experiences a stressor response. Final prevention occurs after the client has received medium prevention assistance. Using these concepts of Barnard’s model, the nurse practitioner can easily recognize applicable involvements at several stages of growth and development. In addition, patients can form partnerships to achieve common goals by considering these five environmental elements.

Relation to the Metaparadigm

The confluence of the concepts of care provider, surroundings, and the child is an important topic that concentrates on children ‘s upbringing and development as well as mother-infant connections. Each member’s particular components influence the parent-infant system, and observational learning improves those attributes to fulfill the system’s needs. Barnard’s model connects to the nursing metaparadigm through the following concepts:

• person; this concept refers to understanding auditory, pictorial, and perceptible stimuli and working with them;
• environment (individuals, locations, things, sounds, and sights);
• health: the essential preventive health care should get handled by the family;
• nursing; nurses employ their qualities, attributes, and attitudes to provide education that facilitates changes in families in the long run.

Strengths and Limitations of the Theory

Strengths of Dr. Barnard’s model are:

• Assistance in developing intuitive knowledge guides.
• Highlights and helps in establishing what specific foundation set of practice defines neonatal care.
• A solid connection to practice has changed how healthcare professionals evaluate children in the context of the parent-child relationship.
• Assistance to first-time mothers, and all mothers in general, in finding purpose in the setting of neonatal care by improving the mother-infant relationship.
• Mothers are provided with the assumption directives in caring for their infants while providing their utmost care, therefore defining and amassing knowledge on treating their kids at different scopes.
• Demonstration of the importance of simple notions and our interpersonal relationships in achieving or enhancing psychosocial and mental progress.

In turn, some of the significant barriers to the model can be divided into five categories:

• Non-standard performance in clinical surroundings; these conditions lead to few mothers disregarding updated notional awareness presented in the teaching space by following the non-standard ways of what they are used to doing.
• Mistrust in medical competence, however, much unlikely to happen.
• Relationships between mothers and infants with unique hardships had fewer obvious communicative cues and experienced less sensitivity during their interaction (Agazzi et al., 2018). Mothers’ behavior gets judged as less ideal in supporting social-emotional and perceptual progression, shown in demanding education scenarios but not in more relaxed feeding scenarios.
• Disparities while doing tasks designed to simulate the world and doing things in actual clinical situations. As per Dr. Barnard’s hypothesis, it is more biased on population specificity than discipline specificity, which highly impacts early encounters if someone has got the prior know-how with newly born babies. While in clinical situations, the theory provides little to no information on the subject involving maintaining a stable environment that would improve mental growth and development for infants or children.

Application in the Clinical Setting

A person’s ability to grasp aural, visual, and sensory stimuli is matched by their ability to apply that information purposefully. The family and how it interacts are essential factors in promoting the health of this connection. It is a form of preventative health care that will eliminate behavioral disorders as the baby progresses in stature if the parent-child interaction is effective. In addition, the theory is applied to reveal anything that could play a role in the parent-child relationship. Animated and inanimate items can influence the exchange in the surroundings. Finally, Barnard’s model helps nurses to teach and encourage healthy surroundings, promoting newborn-parent connection while ensuring that the alternative environment is adaptive.

I would share the application of this theory with my colleagues by guiding the research process, and developing and testing phenomena of interest. A continual reflexive and periodic association between theory, practice, and research with colleagues are vital to upturn the nursing profession’s aptitude to come across social obligations and responsibilities (Younas, & Quennell, 2019). This will assist in bridging the gap separating theory and practice and encourage theory-guided practice.

Professionally, practical work generates theoretical research topics and information. Its key focus in clinical settings has been to learn from the past, inquiring and reasoning concerning what nurses complete. The bond between a mother and child is strong from birth. As a consequence, with every child in its mother’s arms, all she wants is to keep it close, not solely in the physical state but in the psychological context. This theory dramatically enhances these values by helping families grasp their children’s needs from a mental perspective. This will impact my practice the more since it is virtuous to hold families together with compassion and love.

Whether nurses are not conscious of it, nursing theories are applied daily in practice. Ideas assist in evidence-based research, which underwrites the formation of best practices in the long run. Such processes and regulations guarantee that patients are safe while receiving the finest possible treatment. They also help clinicians positively impact their patient’s health and comfort past just looking after them at the bedside (Brandão et al., 2019). Nursing theory-guided conduct aids in promoting the regular care provided and progressing the nursing practice into the twenty-first century. Since most caregivers lack knowledge of the principles that reinforce their work, their worth is repeatedly disregarded. For this case, concepts to be set up would be concrete concepts since they are immediately sensed and linked to a specific time or location and abstract concepts that are mentally formed without regard to time or place.

References

Agazzi, H., Knap, K., Tan, S. Y., &; Armstrong, K. (2018). Lessons learned from the application of parent-child interaction therapy with children with an autism spectrum disorder. Handbook of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy for Children on the Autism Spectrum, 12(3), 517–530.

Brandão, M. A., Barros, A. L., Caniçali Primo, C., Bispo, G. S., &; Lopes, R. O. (2019). Nursing theories in the conceptual expansion of good practices in nursing.Revista Brasileira De Enfermagem, 72(2), 577–581.

Ransone, S. H., Graff, J. C., Bush, A. J., Oxford, M., &; Wicks, M. N. (2018). Psychometric evaluation of the Nursing Child Assessment Teaching (NCAT) scale in a community-based sample.Research in Nursing & Health, 41(3), 301–311.

Risjord, M. (2018). Middle-range theories as models: New criteria for analysis and evaluation. Nursing Philosophy, 20(1), e12225.

Willis, D. W., Condon, M. C., Moe, V., Munson, L., Smith, L., &; Eddy, J. M. (2022). The context and development of the early relational health screen. Infant Mental Health Journal.

Younas, A., &; Quennell, S. (2019). Usefulness of nursing theory‐guided practice: An integrative review. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 33(3), 540–555.