Role of parental responses in childhood pain coping - Version 1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Examining the role of parental responses on the coping strategies used by children with Chronic Pain.
IRAS ID
305492
Contact name
Cynthia Ebere-Anaba
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Liverpool
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 1 months, 11 days
Research summary
Research Summary:
The study aims to explore the relationship between parental responses to their child’s chronic pain and the coping strategies that their child uses to manage. Children diagnosed with chronic pain (which is described as persistent pain lasting longer than three to six months despite medication or treatment) and their parents will be recruited for this study. The importance of parent responses on child pain behaviour and management has been recorded by various research. Parent responses have been found to influence child psychosocial factors such as social skills development, stress management, and coping strategies etc. Discussions with children suffering from other chronic illnesses have also highlighted that they attribute their good adjustment and coping with their illness to their parent's consistent responses and appropriate coping methods.Previous studies examining the impact of parental responses on children’s pain coping have mainly focused on protective or anxious responses and gathered responses primarily from mothers or parents alone. The current study will gather information about children’s coping strategies from both parents and the child struggling with chronic pain. Research into the coping strategies used by children with chronic pain is limited from the perspective of the child. It has been suggested that depending on the child’s age more problem-solving strategies are used to manage pain.
The study will focus on children aged between eight and seventeen years old and their parents who will be recruited from the chronic pain team at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool. Participants will be recruited over a period of approximately six months. Participants will be required to fill out three online questionnaires focused on adult responses, childhood pain coping, and pain catastrophization. Both parent and child participants will fill out respective versions of the same questionnaires which contain the same number of questions.
Summary of Results:
Chronic pain, which has lasted longer than 3 months, has been shown to affect how children function daily. Most childhood chronic pain research has mainly included parent-only reports and focused on social support and parent responses to child pain. In this study, we explored whether parents using protective responses and having high pain catastrophizing level will affect the ways that a child copes with their pain.This study gathered survey responses from 62 parents and their children with chronic pain. Child participants were aged on average 13.2 years and were primarily white Irish/British and female. Similarly, parent participants were predominantly white and female. The child participants had nine different chronic pain types and the most common chronic pain diagnosis was abdominal pain.
The results showed that child and parent coping are linked and regardless of age, when a child sees their parent using active coping strategies like positive thinking, relaxation and exercise, they would also use these strategies. Children who were female appeared to use less active coping strategies which are strategies that try to distract from and avoid the pain. High parental worries about their child’s pain appeared to increase a parent’s use of protective parental responses and higher levels of child pain catastrophizing. Themes of pain-related worries, using self-regulation skills, and wanting the pain to disappear were evident in the thoughts and actions that children described they do in when in pain. Finally, the child participants appeared to use a variety of active and less active coping strategies to manage their pain and their parents age and use of protective responses to their pain did not influence their coping decisions.
This research provided evidence for the creation of parent-only interventions and the already used child-parent treatments. Parents worry about their child’s pain and need to be targeted to make sure that parent’s concerns are addressed and do not influence how a child thinks about and manages their pain. More research is needed into how parents and children manage the child’s pain symptoms and should include the role of gender and ethnicity as the current research showed that this may influence how the pain is experienced.
REC name
West Midlands - South Birmingham Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/WM/0101
Date of REC Opinion
21 Jun 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion