2019 Volume 28 Pages 69-77
The purpose of this study was to investigate feelings and the behavior patterns of mothers that stay in the hospital to attend to their children during their scheduled short period hospital stay for the surgery and to discuss the way of how to support a child who is admitted to a hospital and the family. We performed a semi-constitutive interview using an interview guide and qualitatively analyzed the answers in 20 mothers staying in the hospital with their infants and small children that were admitted to the hospital for a scheduled short period. The results revealed the behavior patterns of mothers that stayed in the hospital with their children to be based on a feeling of obligation to their role of taking care of their sick children and bound by ideal mother image. In their real behavior patterns, the mothers accumulated fatigue due to the hospital stay with a minimum level of living in order to prioritize taking care of their children. Then, they encouraged themselves with prospect of relief from a minimum level of living and at the discharge they finally freed themselves from a tolerating minimum level of living. As a conclusion, the needs for the instruction on an overview of the hospital stay and the supports to convert the mother’s obligation feeling of being an ideal mother to be more flexible were suggested to support mothers that stay in the hospital with their children during the scheduled short period hospital stay.
