by Thomas Hobson
Child Life Director

The other day I was reminded of one of the main ideas within the field of Child Life: the known is less scary then the unknown.

This thought struck me as I was taking my son to a doctor’s visit. Based on everything I knew that was going to happen, he was going to have to give a urine sample. Now, this doesn’t sound scary and it’s not painful, but to a six-year-old, it can be stressful.

As a parent, it is easy to want to spare your child the mental suffering of an upcoming experience. So, it’s easy to not tell the child anything, with the thought of ignorance is bliss. “Why worry the child, when it’ll all be over and done before they even know it? Besides, they might get upset or obsessed on the experience.”

The truth is that children do much better when prepared in advance for potentially stressful experiences. If left in the dark, it is not uncommon for children to have magical thinking fill in the blanks. Magical thinking is where thoughts do not always follow an obvious path and sometime are connected to unrelated events. For instance, as a child, I had a bad case of chicken poxes and I linked it to a fish fry that I had eaten at the day before. I didn’t eat fish again until I was an adult. So, in the child’s mind, this turns a relatively simple procedure into something far more sinister.

When preparing your child for a potentially stressful experience, there are a couple of things to consider:

• Age: The younger your child’s age the closer to the event you want to prepare them. For instance, you may talk to a teenager several days in advance, but a five-year old you might prepare a few minutes before the actual procedure.
• Focus on the experience: Tell your child about the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch of the experience. These concrete elements can be much more stressful the abstract concept of the implications of the test.
• Be honest: If it is going to hurt, tell them it will. If you say that it won’t and then it does, you run the risk of being viewed as a liar by your child.
• Use their language level: When preparing your child, don’t use all of the technical terms, but instead use language and examples that they will understand. Yes, this may involve simplifying parts of the procedure, but it will help them to understand why a particular step is happening.

During our recent doctor’s visit, my son and I talked about the possible urine sample on the drive over to his doctor’s office. We talked about each step, from receiving the cup to turning it back in. He and I went as far as to talk about the temperate of the urine because I knew he would ask. In the end, what could have been a stressful experience turned into a joke between co-conspirators. He was proud that he gave the sample, and even told his sister about it as soon as we got home.

Isn’t it amazing what a couple of minutes of talking can do?