Parental catastrophizing about their child's chronic pain: Are mothers and fathers different?

Abstract

Preliminary evidence suggests that parental catastrophizing about their child's pain may be important in understanding both parental responses to their child's pain and the child's pain experience. However, little is known about potential differences between mothers and fathers. There were three aims of the present study addressing this lack of knowledge: i) to investigate the three-factor structure of the German version of the Parental Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS-P) (Goubert et al., 2006) in mothers and fathers of children with chronic pain, ii) to explore differences between mothers and fathers in parental catastrophizing, iii) to investigate the contribution of parental catastrophizing on the child's chronic pain problem and pain-related parent behavior.In a sample of 128 mothers and fathers of paediatric chronic pain patients, the invariance of the PCS-P was evaluated. Results replicated the previously established three-factor structure (i.e. rumination, magnification and helplessness) in both groups. Mothers reported higher levels of catastrophizing as compared to fathers.Specifically, mothers and fathers differed on levels of rumination; the two groups did not differ in magnification and helplessness. Maternal but not paternal catastrophizing contributed significantly in explaining the child's pain intensity whereas neither mothers' nor fathers' catastrophizing were significantly related to the child's disability. Both maternal and paternal catastrophizing contributed significantly to heightened parental solicitous responses. Fathers' but not mothers' catastrophizing also contributed to heightened distracting responses. The present findings attest to the importance of maternal and paternal catastrophizing for the child's pain characteristics and pain-related parent behavior, which are both relevant for treatment conceptualization.3

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

“…These coping strategies for own pain might extend to how parents respond to child pain [18,22,28]. However, this is in contrast with evidence indicating that, in general, men have a bias toward problem-focused strategies relative to emotion-focused strategies [29,39].…”

“…Catastrophic thinking about one's child's pain has recently been discovered to be important in understanding parental responses [21,22]. Catastrophic thinking is the habitual misinterpretation of normal threat as awful and impossible to cope with [51].…”

“…Mothers, for example, report higher levels of catastrophic thoughts about child pain, compared to fathers [21,22]. It is likely that mothers' and fathers' goal priorities also differ depending on the extent of their catastrophic thinking.…”

The impact of parental gender, catastrophizing and situational threat upon parental behaviour to child pain: A vignette study

“…Hermann et al, 2008;Huguet et al, 2008) may shed light on parental behaviours protecting the child from otherwise more negative outcomes (Vervoort et al, 2011b). It is likely that fathers, as compared to mothers, engage more often in the promotion of well-behaviours (Hechler et al, 2011) given their role in encouraging the child"s independence (Power and Shanks, 1989;Kenny and Gallagher, 2002).…”

“…Considering that solicitous responses toward their children"s pain behaviour may increase sick-role behaviours and disability (Palermo and Eccleston, 2009), it is plausible that the association between parental catastrophizing and children"s disability may be explained by parents" solicitous behaviours. Previous findings indeed showed that catastrophizing (about own or child pain) is related with more solicitousness toward their child in pain (Langer et al, 2009;Hechler et al, 2011).…”