Mothers’ and fathers’ responses to their child’s pain moderate the relationship between the child’s pain catastrophizing and disability☆

Parents who catastrophize about their child’s pain prioritize attempts to control pain

“…In further support, several studies found maladaptive influences of parental protective responses to child pain [10,37,43,54,55], which seem especially prevalent in parents who catastrophize about child pain [5,48].…”

“…Parental responses may vary from ignoring and discouraging to protecting and comforting [4,9,32]. Although the efficacy of any particular parental strategy should be understood in its particular context, a general finding has emerged that parental attention to pain, typically operationalized as solicitousness, overprotectiveness, or reassurance, has a negative effect on child coping [10,37,43,54,55]. In contrast, parental behavior that encourages coping by directing children to distract or introducing new strategies is related to less child distress and pain [4,9].…”

Severity of pediatric pain in relation to school-related functioning and teacher support: An epidemiological study among school-aged children and adolescents

“…Additionally, the current study examined the buffering role of two specific teacher support dimensions. Future research may benefit from including multiple informants and more objective indicators (e.g., reports of child absence/academic performance obtained from the school/teacher/parent) as well as other types of support (e.g., pain-specific coping support [60] from various support providers including teachers, parents [37] and peers [29,50].…”

Impact of parental catastrophizing and contextual threat on parents’ emotional and behavioral responses to their child’s pain

“…Fourth, the 23" " majority of participating parents were mothers. As mothers' responses may differ from those of fathers [39,50,61,78], future studies are needed to investigate whether similar patterns are true for fathers. Fifth, the coding system we used was limited to verbal behavior.…”