When the child is in pain the parents tend to offer “things the kids like”. Research over the last few years has shown, however, that distracting the child (“taking her mind away” from pain) is better in reducing the occurrence of recurrent pain in children (an example is recurrent abdominal pain), than paying attention to the pain (M. van Tilburg, Pediatric Pain Letter, Vol 11(3)2009). In other words the “kiss the booboo” attitude (the one I grew up with and the one practiced by my own parents back in Greece), seems to promote pain experiences and expressions in kids (and adults for that matter) than suppressing them. Actually, we have evidence for this in adult populations. Functioning imaging techniques (the modern way of seeing one’s brain cell activity without having to “open up the skull”) have indeed shown that the presence of an overly helpful spouse increases three times the brain activity in patients with chronic low back pain!

My second point relates to pain felt by adolescents. During adolescence young people experience significant biological, cognitive, psychological and social changes. Adolescents also experience many recurrent pains such as headaches, dental pains, stomach pains, limb and back pains or more than one pain problem. During adolescence, while our kids learn to become “autonomous” and more “of their own person”, they chose to spend more time with their friends and peers than their parents. We talked earlier about how important parental behavior is in shaping future pain experiences a) from the “role model” point of view if a parent has chronic pain, and b) by reinforcing children’s behaviours in perceiving and expressing pain. Peer behaviours, subsequently play a significant role in learning how, where and when to express pain.

As I have discussed in previous articles females tend to feel and have more pains than men. Research has shown that the “socialization” process may be responsible for part of this, as that girls tend to report more pain models, which are frequently female and more supportive environments when they express pain (J. Hachette, Pediatric Pain Letter, Vol 7(1)2005). Please remember, that none of my articles attempt to cover a pain topic in depth as this is impossible. However, I do aim to providing a general overview that is no more that “touching the tip of the iceberg”. Editor’s Note: For more in-depth information about pain, please read Dr. Mailis Gagnon’s book, Beyond Pain: Making the Mind and Body Connection