Too sick for school? Parent influences on school functioning among children with chronic pain

Abstract

Parental responses to children with chronic pain have been shown to influence the extent of the child’s functional disability, but these associations have not been well-studied in relation to children’s pain-related school functioning. The current study tests the hypothesis that parental pain catastrophizing and parental protective responses to child pain influence the extent of school impairment in children with chronic pain. A mediational model was tested to determine whether parental protective behaviors serve a mediating role between parental pain catastrophizing and child school impairment. Study participants were a clinical sample of 350 children ages 8–17 with chronic pain and their parents. Measures of pain characteristics, demographic characteristics, child depressive symptoms, school attendance rates, overall school functioning, parental pain catastrophizing and parental protective responses to pain were collected. Results show that, controlling for the known influences of pain intensity and child depressive symptoms, parental pain catastrophizing and parental protective responses to child pain each independently predict child school attendance rates and reports of overall school impairment. Parental protectiveness was found to mediate the association between parental cognitions (i.e. parent pain catastrophizing) and child school functioning outcomes. These findings underscore the importance of intervening with parents to foster parental responses to child pain that help children engage and succeed in the school environment despite pain.

Personal and Contextual Factors Affecting the Functional Ability of Children and Adolescents with Chronic Pain

“…Four studies reported a correlation between parent catastrophizing and functional ability, 19,29,36,45 with links between parent catastrophizing and child attributes in parent-adolescent dyadic relationships, pain catastrophizing by both members of the dyad correlated with functional disability, 19 with more than 70% of the dyads having a concordance in catastrophizing. Among nonconcordant dyads, the dyad with low levels of parent catastrophizing and high levels of adolescent catastrophizing was highly correlated with functional disability than the dyad with the reverse.…”

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].…”

Functional Abdominal Pain in Childhood and Long-term Vulnerability to Anxiety Disorders

“…Social anxiety disorder was particularly common in the pediatric FAP patients and may contribute to school absence and withdrawal from social activities, thereby perpetuating painrelated disability. 51 A decade after the seminal work by Campo et al, 13 these data underscore the importance of a biopsychosocial approach to FAP that includes screening for anxiety and depression. Future research should evaluate whether interventions that treat mental health problems in FAP improve abdominal pain outcomes.…”