Although pain is best understood from a biopsychosocial perspective, the social context of pain is often overlooked. For infantsand children undergoing painful medical procedures, parents are a key social factor who can influence pain outcomes. Parents’feeling of being helpful to their child can contribute to a sense of control over a challenging situation and affirm their parental role.Integrating parents in procedural support and pain management is consistent with family integrated care and helps equip parentswith nurturing skills they can use beyond the acute period. Yet major gaps exist in our knowledge about parent-child interactionsduring their children’s pain which would inform best practices including a focus on how parents speak to their children (i.e.,beyond what they say), the role of fathers, and singing as serving an important communicative function. In an interdisciplinaryworkshop, three talks will explore the voice of parents in infant, child and youth procedural pain. The first talk will provide datafrom a cutting edge scoping review of parental vocal cues in the context of their children’s pain and relations to child outcome.The second talk will focus on fathers including their experience with the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and father-ledinterventions for infant pain. In the third talk, we argue that music therapy via singing provides a means through which parentscan access and learn to use their nurturing resources to promote neonatal procedural support. Results from new research whereparents and health professionals are included as co-researchers to identify facilitators for parent-delivered pain management willbe presented. This workshop will include critical reflections of the available research evidence including key areas for futureresearch and translating what is known into effective practice.
Parents’ live singing, an apt medium for affective communication in neonatal procedural support.
The parent’s singing voice is a protective and nurturing resource for hospitalized infants against the adverse effects of pain andseparation. Early affective and social interactions are important for healthy infant development and should be incorporatedinto parent-delivered interventions during painful procedures. Research on parents’ active participation in infant pain managementand their views on being a mediator in their own infant’s pain relief is scarce.Parents as pain management in Swedish neonatalcare (SWEpap), is an ongoing interdisciplinary multi-centre two-part study. The first part investigates health professionals’ viewson and parents’ experiences of parent-delivered pain management during venipuncture. The second part of SWEpap is arandomized controlled trial investigating the efficacy of combined pain management with live parental lullaby singing,breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact (SSC) during routine metabolic screening of newborn infants. There is sufficient evidencefor the efficacy of breastfeeding and SSC. Yet, more research is needed to develop additional early preventive therapeuticinterventions. Live parental lullaby singing is an underutilized biopsychosocial parent-delivered intervention that could reduce painon its own but especially in combination with SSC and breastfeeding.