The participation of a four-year-old child in discussing life style during the family’s extensive health examination
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23990/sa.77856Keywords:
preventive health services, life style, interaction, childrenAbstract
Preventive lifestyle counselling helps discussing children’s weight issues with families. An extensive health examination in child health care clinics provides a potentially important arena for discussing lifestyle matters with families with under 6-year old children. Children’s participation in these discussions is valuable and helpful from the viewpoints of family-centered and child-centered ideologies as well as previous research evidence. This article examines interaction between a public health nurse, parent(s) and a four-year-old child during an extensive health examination where a health educative game is utilized. Our research questions are: 1) what kinds of verbal practices adults use to encourage children to participate in conversations about family’s lifestyle, and 2) how children respond to adults’ turns that encourage their participation. The data consists of audio-recorded encounters in child health care clinics (n=35) and the method is conversation analysis. Based on the qualitative, inductive analysis, we illustrate that the adults’ questions addressed to children focus on 1) daily activities, or 2) daily activities done at specified times of the day. We pro-vide also quantitative evidence when arguing that children can be more effectively engaged in the discussions with questions focusing on daily activities without linking them with specified times of the day. Our analysis also illustrates that there is a need to balance between encouraging the child’s participation and evaluating the family’s lifestyle during the health examination, as these may be in part mutually exclusive aims. Multiple goals should be taken into account when developing preventive child health care services.
