Toshinori Kitamura, MD, PhD – T. & F. Kitamura Foundation for Studies and Skill Advancements of Mental Health, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan

Series: Psychiatry – Theory, Applications and Treatments; Mental Illnesses and Treatments
BISAC: MED105000; MED070000; PSY022000
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52305/JXBD8706

Humans require love and care from their primary caregivers. This process is conceptualized under the term parental bonding. Nonetheless, it is only recently that difficulties of parents in establishing affectionate emotional ties with their child, be it a baby or foetus, have started to attract the attention of clinicians and researchers. This volume is a compilation of reports on recent research advances on parental bonding and its maladjusted manifestation: perinatal bonding disorder. The first four chapters report on recent studies that conducted a concept analysis of parental bonding, taxometric analysis of bonding disorder, developed a new measure of parental emotion towards children, and explored the causal relationships of foetal bonding disorder with the antenatal fear of childbirth. The second five chapters present studies on the stigma associated with mothers with neonatal bonding disorder among the non-professional population. As parental bonding disorder has started to recently be recognised by perinatal health professionals and more lay people alike, this topic has clinical and administrative importance because it may become a target of societal stigma. The five chapters demonstrate the correlates of such stigma along with the importance of midwives’ delivering evidence-based, well-informed explanations about parental bonding disorder to family members.

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