Understanding current thoughts about the maternal infant
attachment process will provide a basis for nurses
and other caregivers to appropriately design care for newly
emerging families. In this regard, this article has three
goals: 1) to examine key concep tualizations of the maternal-infant
attachment process for normal newborns and
for premature infants (based on a concept analysis and an
ethnographic study), 2) to organize key conceptual elements
into a more integrated model, and 3) to examine the
fit of the model with the extremely low-birth-weight
infant/mother group. Although father-infant attachment is
also an important subject, it is not discussed here.