Can prenatal teaching promote maternal attachment? Practicing nurses test Carter‐Jessop's prenatal attachment intervention

A study testing the Carter‐Jessop prenatal attachment intervention was conducted by practicing public health nurses to determine if teaching fetal palpation and massage during the third trimester of pregnancy would show a relationship to maternal attachment behaviors postpartum. The sample consisted of 69 primiparas and multi‐paras from a low‐income, multi‐ethnic population. Unlike Carter‐Jessop's findings, no significant relationships were found between the prenatal intervention and maternal behaviors postpartum. There were significant differences in the frequencies of total attachment behaviors observed between Caucasian and Black mothers indicating a need for further investigation about possible cultural differences in attachment behaviors. The discrepancy between these findings and those of Carter‐Jessop underscores the importance of not generalizing findings to populations not studied.