10 Tips to Help Kids Manage Pain

Pain is not only caused by some illnesses and disorders, it may help prevent recovery from them as well. If you think about it, that makes sense. Pain is a stress on your body. Regardless of what causes, it, your body’s reaction to pain is your blood pressure goes up, your heart races, and your system begins to release stress hormones to help you deal with it. Add to this that it’s difficult to be motivated to do anything to help yourself if you’re having pain, thus perhaps prolonging the initial problem, or maybe even making it worse.

All this may be difficult enough for adults to handle – it may be overwhelming for children and their parents who are trying to help them through the crisis.

According to this article, Controlling Pain Can Speed Recovery For Children With Cancer, there are ways that children may cope with pain, in addition to pain medication, and that their parents can help them.

1-  Talk to your child about what he or she is thinking or feeling. Make talking about feelings a regular activity so your child knows that if you’re approached, you’ll listen.

2-  Educate your child appropriately for his or her level. Explain to your child what is going on at an age-appropriate level. If he or she has an idea of what is happening, the pain may not be so scary. Don’t forget that children have a unique way of believing that they caused something, including pain and illness sometimes.

3-  Don’t minimize or deny the pain. Pain is pain and how much it hurts is very individual. You have some people who can walk on a broken ankle, others who feel the slightest cut or scratch. Also, don’t forget that your experience isn’t the same experience that your child is going through.

4-  Touch your child. If your child doesn’t want to be touched because it is yet another stimulus that he or she can’t handle, find ways to be close. But if you can, try to make some skin contact somehow, even if it’s just touching a forearm or a foot.

5- Stay with your child. While many procedures require the parents to be out of the room, this is often more because the parents get too stressed out. If you can manage seeing your child get poked with yet another needle or go through another painful test, try to get permission to go in with your child.

6-  Talk about ways pain can be controlled. If your child is waiting for a nurse to bring a scheduled dose of pain reliever, remind your child that he or she may have the medication every so many hours. If the pain medication doesn’t seem to be working, remind your child that you both have the power to ask the doctor about trying something else.

7- Avoid showing your own reactions if they’re not positive. If you gasp, cry out, wince, show any signs of negative reaction to your child’s pain, your child will remember that and that will be a reference point.

8- Support your child’s coping mechanism. It may not be your idea of a way to cope with pain, but if your child wants to watch the same movie over and over again, or just walk back and forth, allow your child that choice.

9-  Avoid being part of the team if your child needs to be held down for a procedure. Unfortunately, this may happen if your child is too small to stay still on his or her own or can’t cooperate. But if you help, your child may see you as one of the reasons for the pain.

10- Don’t get angry at your child or scold him or her, especially in terms of “it’s not so bad, you shouldn’t complain so much,” and so on.

Do you have any tips to add?

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