The impact of maternal anxiety on hospitalized children

Introduction: hospitalization is a critical event for children, with many effects on their quality life and on their behavioural and emotional development. The most common symptoms are: anxiety, depression, apathy and withdrawal, anger and aggressiveness, post-traumatic stress symptoms, regression to preceding development stages, decrease of interests and plays, eating and sleep disorders. Some factors could have implications with the development of this wide negative hospitalization symptomatology. First of all, they refer to the medical condition, then also to child’s/parent’s/family’s characteristics. Recent works have focalized on the impact of mother emotional state on the adjustment of hospitalized children. High mother anxiety and frustration levels, during hospital admission of their children, are related with low child’s capacity to react in an adequate manner to the critical situation and with more perceived suffering (Melnyk, 2000; Board, 2005; Barlow & Ellard, 2006). Objective: The aim of our work is to give a contribution to research on the impact of mother anxiety on hospitalized children. In details, our goals are: 1) to verify the existence of a relationship between maternal anxiety and anxious and depressive child symptoms; 2) to study mother anxiety and its link with the child psycho-physical adjustment during the admission; 3) to verify the existence of a connection between maternal anxiety and children coping strategies to face the admission and the hospitalization. Method: 36 dyads mother-child participated to this study. Children (Age range: 6-12 years) were admitted in a Paediatric unit. We administered: 1) State-Trait Anxiety Scale - Y form (STAI-Y; Spielberger, Gorsuch & Lushene, 1989) to mothers for the assessment of their anxiety; 2) Test dell’Ansia e Depressione nell’Infanzia e nell’Adolescenza (TAD; Newcomer, Barenbaun & Bryana, 1995), to children for measuring their anxious and depressive symptoms; Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ-PF50; Landgraf, Abets & Ware, 1996), to mother to assess the child psycho-physical perceived adjustment, KIDCOPE (Spirito, Stark & Williams, 1988) to children to assess the coping strategies to face hospitalization. Results and Discussion: Results supports most of our hypothesis. Analysis shows higher maternal anxiety (both trait and state) levels relates with higher child anxious and depressive symptom. Higher anxiety level correlates also with a worse psycho-physical children adjustment. On the other hand, low maternal anxious states relates with active and positive coping strategies to face the critical event of hospitalization. This study don’t support any relationship between avoidant-negative coping strategies and maternal anxiety. Further analysis will need to assess the direction of the relationship found.