Impending hospitalization: timing of preparation for the school-aged child.
The current consensus on the optimal time for preparing children for impending hospitalization rests on clinical expertise and experimental group data. The study reported here has demonstrated marked heterogeneity of temporal preferences across age and sex of children 5 to 12 years old and, as such, questions the validity of applying general guidelines on the timing of preparation to the case of an individual child. Instead, it appears that the parents' knowledge of how the child reacts when confronted with impending events of a potentially threatening nature should be the primary basis for such decisions.
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002140:California; D002648:Child; D002673:Child, Hospitalized / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D013997:Time Factors