Exploring how pregnant people in recovery from opioid use disorder describe their child during pregnancy.

OBJECTIVE

Understanding parenting strengths and challenges among pregnant people in recovery from opioid use disorder supports effective intervention delivery. How parents think and feel about their child prenatally has implications for postnatal parenting. In our past work, greater use of positive compared to negative or neutral prenatal descriptors of the child during pregnancy was associated with higher sensitivity, warmth, and engagement during caregiver-infant interactions 12-months postpartum. We analyzed descriptions of the child among pregnant people in recovery compared to a non-substance using sample to further our understanding of potential parenting strengths and risks for people in recovery.

METHOD: Participants included pregnant people (N = 18; M age = 30.06, SD = 3.33) recruited from an outpatient substance use treatment program providing buprenorphine (recovery sample) and a comparison sample of pregnant people (N = 120; M age = 26.16, SD = 5.71) reporting high rates of economic disadvantage and intimate partner violence, but not substance use. Through a semi-structured interview, participants described the personality of the child they were pregnant with in up to five words/phrases. Each description was coded as positive, neutral, or negative.

RESULTS

Participants in the recovery sample used a greater number of positive words on average (M = 3.5, SD = 1.4) relative to the comparison sample (M = 2.7, SD = 1.5; Cohen's d = 0.56, 95 % confidence interval: LL = 0.06, UL = 1.06). Use of negative descriptors was similar across samples.

CONCLUSIONS

Assessing how pregnant people in recovery think and feel about their developing fetus is feasible and could create opportunities for engagement in preventive parenting interventions to support healthy conceptualizations of the child.