Risk and Resilience: The Role of Parent Functioning in Pediatric Chronic Pain
Date
2024-09-10
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Abstract
Objective: Pediatric chronic pain is prevalent and can significantly interfere with children’s physical, emotional, social, and educational functioning. Parent factors have been shown to play an important role in children’s chronic pain; however, research has predominately focused on parent responses to child pain to the exclusion of parents’ own functioning (i.e., their physical and mental health). The broad aim of this dissertation was to examine the association between parent functioning, specifically their own chronic pain and mental health symptoms, and child chronic pain using a multi-method approach. Methods: Three studies were conducted. The first study was a systematic review and meta-analysis of the extant literature examining associations between parent mental health and children’s chronic pain and related functioning in both clinical and community samples. The second study used daily diary data from a clinical sample of 76 youth referred to a tertiary pain program and one of their parents to examine the associations between parent chronic pain status, parent daily variability (in their anxiety, mood, protective responses, and parenting stress), and youth daily pain intensity and interference. The third study used data from 1128 mother-child dyads enrolled in a longitudinal, community-based cohort study to identify risk and resilience factors throughout childhood that moderated the intergenerational transmission of chronic pain. Results: Poorer functioning (i.e., chronic pain and/or mental health problems) in parents was significantly associated with the presence of chronic pain in community samples of children as well as the pain-related functioning of clinical samples of children with chronic pain. Parent chronic pain and mental health symptoms were related to children’s chronic pain and functioning in distinct as well as interacting ways. Several general parent and child factors were found to contribute to the association between parent functioning and child chronic pain, either increasing or decreasing the strength of the association, including ineffective parenting practices, child optimism, and child connections with adults. Conclusions: Parent functioning plays an important role in pediatric chronic pain, increasing children’s risk for poor adaptation to chronic pain, and should be more widely considered in research and clinical interventions for pediatric chronic pain.
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Keywords
Intergenerational, Parent, Pediatric, Risk, Resilience, Chronic Pain, Mental Health
Citation
Beveridge, J. (2024). Risk and resilience: the role of parent functioning in pediatric chronic pain (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.