How To Deal With Premature Birth?

The vast majority of premature children will be children with absolutely normal development, but even so they have a number of characteristics or peculiarities that are worth knowing.

In this article we present a summary of the recommendations offered by the group of pediatricians who wrote the Practical Guide for Parents , which is published by the Spanish Association of Pediatrics.

The first thing to be clear about is that premature babies are those born before 37 weeks of gestation. Keep in mind that the date that doctors calculate as the due date corresponds to the 40th week of pregnancy.

A child born two weeks before this date, that is, 38 weeks, is not considered premature, but those born four weeks earlier, at week 36 of gestation, are premature children.

Specialists emphasize that it is easy to understand that not all premature babies are the same : It is not the same to be born five weeks earlier, at the 35th week of gestation, than to be born at the 24th week of gestation, 16 weeks before the probable date of delivery. .

Premature infants are born with their organs immature and therefore are not prepared to assume the functions that are required in life outside the womb.

Corrected age

This is a very important concept. Corrected age is called the age that the child would have if it had been born at 40 weeks of gestation, that is, on the probable date of delivery.
For example, a 6-month-old boy who was born at week 32 of gestation, 8 weeks before his due date, has a corrected age of 4 months.

The development of the child, his weight and his height will be in relation to his corrected age and not to his real age.

The pediatrician when looking at the child’s weight charts will use the corrected age ; When assessing the development of the child, when he sits, when he walks, he will also consider the corrected age.

The entire development of the child should be assessed with corrected age; the only thing the actual age will be used for will be vaccines .

The warmth of the home

When premature children come home, a series of precautions must be taken. Most have difficulty controlling temperature.

If it is very hot in the room, they may develop a fever and if it is cold their temperature will drop below normal limits.

The room should be between 21 and 23 degrees and you have to pay attention to the clothes the child is wearing ; If you have doubts about whether it is too warm or not, you can take its temperature.

The specialists will consider normal the axillary temperature between 36.5 and 37 degrees. If they are colder, part of the calories that the milk provides will be spent on maintaining temperature and it will be more difficult for them to gain weight.

If they are hotter than normal, they will also consume more energy and also being too warm increases the risk of sudden death.

Feeding premature infants

The best food for premature infants is breast milk. Some children breastfeed from the beginning but others will not be able to do so during the first days or the first weeks of life and the mother will have to express the milk that the child will drink.

When they are discharged, many premature babies breastfeed without problems. They usually need very frequent feedings, every two or two and a half hours, because their stomach capacity is small and also when they breastfeed they get tired right away.

For the little milk

If the mother’s milk supply seems to decrease, it may help to put the child in skin-to-skin contact with her mother.

The mother naked from the waist up will sit down and place the baby naked or only in the diaper between her breasts. Then both can be covered with a blanket or with the mother’s clothing. This is what is called the kangaroo method.

In this way, the development of the child is helped and the amount of milk produced by the mother is increased. Kangaroo care can be maintained until the child is comfortable in that position.