Parent–child interactions during pediatric venipuncture: Investigating the role of parent traits, beliefs, and behaviors in relation to child outcomes

Background: The social context is critical to children’s pain, and parents frequently form a major aspect of this context. We addressed several gaps in our understanding parent–child interactions during painful procedures identified intrapersonal contributions parental affective responses behaviors. used the pain empathy model framework examine venipuncture determine predictors parent distraction reassurance.Aims: examined relations among child behaviors along with fear fear. empirically tested contribution top-down influences predicting use two common utterances, reassurance venipuncture, including beliefs about these behaviors.Methods: Venipunctures 100 5- 10-year-old children were filmed, coded using full 35 item Child Adult Medical Procedure Interaction Scale. Two codes particular interest: distraction. Self-report measures included fear, trait anxiety, empathy, catastrophizing, distraction.Results: Findings supported original Child–Adult Scale linking “distress-promoting” poorer outcomes “coping-promoting” improved outcomes. Parent traits accounted for small portion variance distraction.Conclusions: are consistent research on coping distress promoting Using novel model, we found that largely did not predict their procedural behaviors, which more strongly related needle