Developmental Milestones and Mother/Baby Bonding: An Educational Program for Incarcerated Mothers

Abstract

Parenting classes in mother baby units can facilitate infant developmental milestone acquisition and bonding, attachment, and positive relationships between mother and baby. Staff members in a mother baby unit at an Indiana women’s prison identified a need to improve developmental milestones, attachment, routines, and trauma/attachment between incarcerated mothers and their infants on the unit through capstone program development. The purpose of this capstone project was to create and implement resources and classes for the needs identified by the site. The capstone student identified topics of interest for both the staff members and the incarcerated mothers to ensure that the topics and information for the program implementation were client centered. At the conclusion of the capstone, the staff members were satisfied with the resource and class implementation and believed that it helped to promote development, bonding, attachment, and routines with the incarcerated mothers and their infants. They also stated that there was a high likelihood that they would continue implementing the resources and utilizing information from the classes after the capstone for current and future mothers on the unit.