Understanding Your Baby: A Parallel Group Study of a Universal Parenting Support Program

Understanding Your Baby: A Universal Parenting Support Program Aiming at Increasing Danish First Time Parents' Abilities for Understanding and Meeting Their Infants' Needs

In Understanding Your Baby first-time parents receive research-based knowledge on how to interpret their infants' socioemotional needs based on their behavior, and how to meet their infants' socioemotional needs in accordance with their developmental stage. This information is delivered to parents at routine home visits by public health nurses, who are trained in the research base behind the program, and using cue cards and short video clips, which concretely exemplify how infants signal their socioemotional needs and inspire to positive activities between parents and their infants.

The aim of Understanding Your Baby is to support infant socioemotional development by increasing parents' abilities at perceiving, understanding, and responding to their infant's socioemotional signals. Evaluation is based on a parallel group study, with half of the participants receiving care as usual and half of the participants receiving care as usual and Understanding Your Baby. The primary outcome is parental sense of competence and secondary outcomes are parental stress and child socioemotional development.

Inclusion Criteria:

• First-time mother or father/partner
• Singleton pregnancy
• Mother living together with the baby
• Mother living in the Danish municipalities of Køge, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Frederiksberg, Lolland, Holbæk, Næstved, Middelfart, Nyborg or Aalborg.
• Understands Danish or English

Exclusion Criteria:

• Under the age of 18 when the child is born