Self-care at school: perceptions of 6-year-old children.
Occupational therapists who work with young children routinely evaluate self-care and consider it an important domain of practice. Little is known about what children perceive is important self-care or what they experience as self-care within a school context. Without knowledge about children's perspectives of self-care, occupational therapists cannot know whether or not they are targeting areas that are central to children's needs. The purpose of this naturalistic study was to explore 6-year-old children's perceptions of self-care in their school day. Participant observation and group interviewing were used to elicit descriptive information from 24 Grade One children, attending an elementary school located in Sydney, Australia. A fishing game, drawing activity, and excerpts from a videotape of their day at school were used as stimuli to explore how the children described and attributed meaning to their self-care occupations. Findings showed that children described self-care at school two ways. First, they named specific self-care tasks that mirrored adult views of self-care and represented culturally shared views of the concept of self-care across ages. Second, children described highly individual views about self-care that were derived from their own experience of doing self-care at school. These views seemed to be based on their personal perceptions of salient factors in operation at the time of self-care performance such as social and physical contexts, perceived skill, and expectations of others. The findings suggest that occupational therapy assessment and intervention for self-care include sensitivity to experiential differences between adult views of self-care and those of children. This sensitivity should include an attempt to understand children's experiences of self-care in specific contexts such as school.
Chapparo
Christine J
CJ
School of Occupation and Leisure Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, The University of Sydney, Lidcombe, New South Wales 2141, Australia. c.chapparo@fhs.usyd.edu.au
Hooper
Elizabeth
E
D001290:Attitude; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009788:Occupational Therapy / Q000523:psychology; D010988:Play and Playthings / Q000523:psychology; D012574:Schools; D012648:Self Care / Q000523:psychology*; D012649:Self Concept; D014743:Videotape Recording