Initially, mothers of preterm infants used a variety of coping
and comforting strategies manage their traumatic stress. These
strategies included discussing with other mothers with similar
experiences, seeking out information, spending more time with
their infant to repair their relationship and/or to fight fears of
death, or moving away from the hospital in order to start afresh. found that coping mechanisms used by mothers of preterm infants included adaptive/positive (emotion-focused and problem-focused) and maladaptive/negative (dysfunctional). found that majority of mothers with high PTS symptoms used emotion-oriented (44.4%) and problem-oriented (44.4%) and a few mothers used anxiety coping mechanism (11.1%). However, found higher baseline scores on dysfunctional and problem-focused coping in mothers with high PTS symptoms at 1 month follow-up than in mothers without PTS
symptoms at 1 month follow-up, while no significant difference
in PTS symptoms were seen with emotional coping.