Papers of the Week

For families with a child with chronic pain, the home environment is the context in which adaptive or maladaptive illness behaviors are developed. Supporting families to effectively cope with their child's chronic pain is a critical need. This work analyzes intervention approaches from emerging treatment programs to support families coping with pediatric pain that diverge from traditional treatment models by specifically targeting parents. Two novel parent intervention programs are presented that consider caregiver needs in both outpatient and inpatient pain treatment settings: and . These programs are evaluated through comparing parental training components across different stages of treatment. Additionally, the efficacy of in promoting maintenance of children's functional gains achieved in intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment is presented, and compared to previous results of the efficacy of . Specifically, outcomes of 36 children whose parents received the intervention in were compared to a matched control sample of children whose parents did not receive the parent intervention. Similar to the findings from , results indicated that patients whose parents received the intervention maintained/improved program gains in disability, coping, and pain significantly more than patients whose parents did not receive the intervention. Implications for parent-focused intervention development efforts targeting parent and youth functioning in the context of pediatric chronic pain are considered.