Illness Response as it Relates to Developmental Level
The age and developmental level of your child is key to understanding the impact of illness on him or her. How your child responds to the illness and the role he/she plays in managing it are related to her developmental level.
The manner in which illness impacts children varies with their cognitive development:
- Infants and toddlers are unable to understand why they have difficulty breathing, don’t feel well or itch all over. They depend on their parents for physical comfort, and they take their emotional cues from their parents’ emotional reactions.
- Preschoolers are especially vulnerable emotionally because their cognitive development allows some understanding of their body and its functioning, but their characteristic magical thinking leads to misconceptions and fears.
- School-age children have a greater capacity to understand their illness, although at a concrete level. This understanding has the potential of providing them tools for actively coping with both the day-to-day demands as well as the emotional demands of their illness. For school-age children, distress about illness often is manifested through problems with peers.
- Adolescents , with their remarkable development of abstract reasoning, have the potential for even greater self-management skills. However, with their advanced cognitive abilities comes the capacity to project into the future and imagine what life is likely to hold, including the restrictions they may encounter in adulthood. Furthermore, adolescents are notorious for not following their doctor’s recommendations and instead testing out their own ideas of illness management.
Pediatric psychosocial clinicians at National Jewish Health are specially trained to evaluate each child’s response to his chronic illness, with the child’s developmental level foremost in mind. With extensive experience in working with children of all ages with a variety of chronic illnesses, the clinicians are able to evaluate whether a child’s response is expectable given what they are dealing with. They can help distinguish between discouragement and major depression and between mild anxiety and that which is beyond expectable, interfering with functioning. We offer a wealth of experience for enhancing adolescents', children’s and even infants’ coping.
The psychosocial clinicians are also able to evaluate and treat more serious emotional problems that may or may not be related to illness. Clinicians will appraise the family context, including availability of psychological and material resources that are crucial for parents to be able to continue providing support to their child in the future. Families of chronically ill children often have difficulty maintaining a balance between nurturing and supporting a sick child and encouraging independence. The clinician can give feedback and advice about how to maintain a healthy balance. Thus, not only will the child’s adaptation to the illness be helped, but the entire family’s adaptation will receive support.
