Child: care, health and development
-
Child Care Health Dev · May 2014
What do parents know about their children's comprehension of emotions? accuracy of parental estimates in a community sample of pre-schoolers.
Parents' ability to correctly perceive their child's skills has implications for how the child develops. In some studies, parents have shown to overestimate their child's abilities in areas such as IQ, memory and language. Emotion Comprehension (EC) is a skill central to children's emotion regulation, initially learned from their parents. In this cross-sectional study we first tested children's EC and then asked parents to estimate the child's performance. Thus, a measure of accuracy between child performance and parents' estimates was obtained. Subsequently, we obtained information on child and parent factors that might predict parents' accuracy in estimating their child's EC. ⋯ Parents' ability to estimate the level of their child's EC was characterized by a substantial overestimation. The more competent the child, and the more sensitive and structuring the parent was interacting with the child, the more accurate the parent was in the estimation of their child's EC.
-
Child Care Health Dev · Mar 2014
ReviewWas there a plan? End-of-life care for children with life-limiting conditions: a review of multi-service healthcare records.
Planning for care at the end of life (EoL) is an essential component of support and care for families of children with life-limiting conditions. The purpose of this review was to compare documented EoL planning with published children's palliative care standards, across a range of children's healthcare services and to assess the impact on practice of written guidelines to support EoL care planning. ⋯ Current documented EoL planning varies between services. Those who are infrequently involved in the provision of EoL care may benefit from support by those for whom this is part of their daily working life. These professionals can help prepare staff to engage families in these difficult but important conversations - and encourage them to document them in a way that can be easily and readily accessed and shared.
-
Child Care Health Dev · Mar 2014
ReviewTackling child health inequalities due to deprivation: using health equity audit to improve and monitor access to a community paediatric service.
Deprived children constitute a large population with high levels of ill health, and difficulty with access to healthcare contributes to their poor health outcomes. There is debate on how best to engage deprived families and the literature on differential access to paediatric care based on deprivation is limited. ⋯ The model of care used by our community paediatric service successfully engages deprived families, thereby reducing health inequalities due to poor access. Key features are multi-agency working, removing barriers to access, raising staff awareness and use of health equity audit. Our findings provide support for tackling health inequalities via health services that are available to all, but capable of responding proportionately according to level of need, a model recently described as proportionate universalism.
-
Child Care Health Dev · Jan 2014
Lay people's and health professionals' views about breaking bad news to children.
Bad health news is difficult to communicate, especially when parents must give bad news to their children. ⋯ Physicians in training and in practice need to be aware that lay people--and likely parents as well--have diverse and complex opinions about when and how parents should give bad health news to their children.
-
Child Care Health Dev · Sep 2013
The impact of children's perception of an activity as play rather than not play on emotional well-being.
As an important aspect of health and development, a number of policy and practice initiatives across education, health and social care are aimed at increasing children's emotional well-being. Links have been made between young children's emotional well-being and play although empirical evidence is limited. This paper demonstrates that when children perceive an activity as play, they show more signs of emotional well-being than when they perceive the same activity as not play. ⋯ Children demonstrate increased emotional well-being when they perceive an activity as play rather than not play. Findings support the proposition that play can be seen as an observable behaviour but also as a mental state. As well as providing important evidence as to the value of play for enhancing children's emotional well-being, findings are discussed in relation to professional practice in children's services. The paper highlights the training needs of practitioners to enable them to understand children's views about play and use this information to create playful situations which maximize the developmental potential of play.