Preschoolers, parents, and picture books
Preschoolers, parents, and picture books
Young children often experience everyday physical symptoms, like stomach aches or minor injuries in the playground. How they learn to respond to these experiences may shape their ideas and behaviors around health and illness later in life. This is called an illness approach: how someone notices symptoms, assesses the severity, talks about symptoms, and seeks help for their symptoms. Parents play a key role in developing an illness approach, because children learn from their parents’ reactions. Illness approaches may therefore be passed down through generations.
This research of Sterre van der Ziel focused on preschoolers, as little is known about illness approaches at this age. We combined information from children, parents, and professionals using interviews, questionnaires, observations, and picture books. Preschoolers were able to talk about their illness approach: they considered causes, made appraisals of the severity, and expressed the need for parental support. Professionals seemed to underestimate preschoolers’ abilities but also emphasized the importance of parental influence. During vaccination observations, parents’ comforting behavior was linked to how much pain children reported. We also developed and evaluated tools to measure illness approaches in both children and parents. Finally, interviews with adults showed that responses to symptoms often fall into three patterns: affective, practical, or minimizing. Affective and practical responses were often described as positive and minimizing as negative.
In short, early experiences with physical symptoms serve as learning opportunities, and parents play a pivotal role in these experiences. In the future, understanding these processes will help us better support families in adapting helpful illness approaches.