As part of that examination, the doctor will look at the family history of height and weight. If there are no apparent physical deformities in the digestive tract, the doctor will examine the child's environment. If the baby is not gaining weight at a predictable rate, the doctor will do a more extensive examination. Most babies are weighed at birth and that weight is used as a base line for future well-baby check-ups. Infants and toddlers, whose growth is substantially less than expected, are considered to be suffering from FTT. The child may exhibit poor appetite due to depression from insufficient attention from parents. Psychosocial problems, often stemming from a lack of nurturing parent-child relations can lead to a failure to thrive. In addition, if the baby is being breast fed, the quality or quantity of the mother's milk may be the source of the problem. This can be due to economic factors in the family, parental beliefs and concepts of nutrition, or neglect of the child. Most physical defects can be detected shortly after birth.įailure to thrive may also result from lack of available food or the quality of the food offered. Usually the defect is an incomplete development of the organ, and it must be surgically corrected. These defects can occur in the esophagus, stomach, small or large intestine, rectum or anus. Occasionally, there may be an underlying physical condition that inhibits the baby's ability to take in, digest, or process food. Non-organic failure to thrive (NOFTT) is the most common cause of FTT and implies the baby is not receiving enough food due to economic factors or parental neglect, or do to psychosocial problems. Organic failure to thrive (OFTT) implies that the organs involved with digestion and absorption of food are malformed or incomplete so the baby cannot digest its food. Failure to thrive may be due to one or more conditions. When a baby does not gain weigh as expected, or continues to loose weight, it is not thriving.
After that expected loss, babies should gain weight at a steady and predictable rate. Important nursing goals in the care of the infant include providing optimal nutrition, comfort, and rest meeting the infant's psychosocial needs and supplying emotional nurturance and sensory stimulation appropriate to the assessed developmental level.Shortly after birth most infants loose some weight.
The major goals are to encourage the mother to express her feelings without fear of rejection, to model the role of mother and teach her nurturing behaviors, and to promote her self-esteem and confidence. Intervention encompasses identification of infants and mothers at risk for the syndrome and care of both mother or primary caregiver and infant. The need for comfort and nurturing by the infant may not be met, and this may lead to a cycle that exacerbates feeding problems. The infant who is feeding poorly and is irritable may elicit a response in the caregiver that reflects tension and frustration. Parents of infants with failure to thrive syndrome typically display feelings of concern and inadequacy.
These children often have a history of irritability, feeding problems, and disturbed sleep patterns. Additionally, the child with this syndrome displays withdrawing behavior, avoidance of eye contact, and stiffness or flaccid posture when held. The syndrome was first noticed when European psychiatrists studied the development of babies who had spent the first five years of their lives in institutions where they were deprived of the emotional warmth of a mother, father, or other primary caregiver.Ĭharacteristics of the failure to thrive syndrome include lack of physical growth (for example, weight and height below the third percentile for age) and below normal achievement in fine and gross motor, social-adaptive, and language skills as assessed by psychometric testing using a tool such as the Denver Developmental Screening Test. The syndrome can be seen in children with a physical illness, but the term is most often taken to mean failure to thrive due to psychosocial effects such as maternal deprivation. Failure to thrive ( failure to thrive syndrome) physical and developmental retardation in infants and small children.
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