Medikidz: Comic books to help children understand chronic pain

Comic book superheroes are being used to help children understand more about older relatives suffering from chronic pain, in an innovative project. 

Northumbria University academic Dr Derek Jones has been working on a project led by Teesside University Professor Denis Martin to explore how comic book superheroes can help children understand what an older adult with chronic pain is experiencing.

The research project, also involving colleagues from the universities of Dundee, Aberdeen, and Greenwich, has seen the academics work with Medikidz – an international company which produces award-winning comics featuring Marvel-inspired superheroes to put medical information into plain words which children can understand – to create a comic book about chronic pain.

The comic is one of the products from a collaboration between the university partners in the UK Research Council-funded £1.2 million EOPIC (Engaging with Older People and Their Carers to Develop Interventions for the Self-management of Chronic Pain) Project.

Dr Derek Jones, Senior Lecturer in Occupational Therapy at Northumbria University, said: "Education about pain is really important; it is increasingly recognised that explaining to people the biological processes underlying their experience results in better pain management.

"We will be carrying out research to investigate the value of the Medikidz comic book; from what we have been told so far we think it will prove to be helpful to anyone who comes into contact with someone with chronic pain."

Professor Martin, from Teesside University, said: "The idea for the comic came about as we were talking to older people to find out their ideas on how to improve the lives of older people living with chronic pain."

"We learned that there was a need to help grandchildren to better understand the experiences of a grandparent living with chronic pain."

"It can be difficult for a child to understand because they can't see the pain which is making their grandparent miserable and feeling unable to do day-to-day things. We wanted to use that information to develop a product which would help younger relatives understand what the older person is going through, given the lack of information available to help that communication."

Medikidz already produces material to explain to children about their own medical conditions, but working with the EOPIC team, they focused on material to inform a child about the older relative's condition.

The book, entitled 'What's Up with Moira's Grandad: Medikidz Explains Chronic Pain', portrays a typical scenario, which involves a child not understanding why their grandparent has suddenly cancelled time they'd planned to spend with them.

The child is left upset, thinking the grandparent simply isn't bothered - while the grandparent is frustrated and angry at having felt forced to cancel due to difficulty in coping with chronic pain.

The EOPIC team provided the information and outline of the story to Medikidz, who adapted it to use their superheroes to tell the story.

In the story the child is taken on a journey through the human body, with the Medikidz superheroes explaining about chronic pain and how it impacts on someone's life. The happy conclusion shows the child with a better understanding of their grandparent's situation.

The team now plans to distribute the comics to clinics across the region initially and then to expand nationally and further afield.

Grandparents: Strong bond with Grandchildren reduces Depression in both parties

A new study shows that grandparents and grandchildren have real, measurable effects on each other's psychological well-being long into grandchildren's adulthood.

Sara M. Moorman

"We found that an emotionally close grandparent-adult grandchild relationship was associated with fewer symptoms of depression for both generations," said Sara M. Moorman, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute on Aging at Boston College, who will present the study at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

"The greater emotional support grandparents and adult grandchildren received from one another, the better their psychological health."

The study also revealed that giving tangible support to or receiving it from their grandchildren affected the psychological well-being of grandparents but not grandchildren.

Tangible support, also called functional solidarity or instrumental support, includes anything from rides to the store and money to assistance with household chores and advice.

"Grandparents who experienced the sharpest increases in depressive symptoms over time received tangible support, but did not give it," said Moorman, who co-authored the study with Jeffrey E. Stokes, a PhD candidate in sociology at Boston College.

"There's a saying, 'It's better to give than to receive.' Our results support that folk wisdom—if a grandparent gets help, but can't give it, he or she feels badly.

Grandparents expect to be able to help their grandchildren, even when their grandchildren are grown, and it's frustrating and depressing for them to instead be dependent on their grandchildren."

Comparatively, the researchers found that grandparents who both gave and received tangible support experienced the fewest symptoms of depression over time.

"Therefore, encouraging more grandparents and adult grandchildren to engage in this type of exchange may be a fruitful way to reduce depression in older adults," said Moorman.

In their study, the researchers used data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a survey of 3- and 4-generation U.S. families that included seven waves of data collection between 1985 and 2004.

The sample was comprised of 376 grandparents and 340 grandchildren. The average grandparent was born in 1917 and the average grandchild in 1963, making them 77 years old and 31 years old, respectively, at the midpoint of the study in 1994.

In terms of the study's implications, Moorman said her research suggests that efforts to strengthen families shouldn't stop with the nuclear family or focus only on families with younger children.

"Extended family members, such as grandparents and grandchildren, serve important functions in one another's daily lives throughout adulthood," she said.

The study also indicates that helping older people remain functionally independent may aid their psychological well-being, according to Moorman.

"Most of us have been raised to believe that the way to show respect to older family members is to be solicitous and to take care of their every need," Moorman said.

"But all people benefit from feeling needed, worthwhile, and independent. In other words, let granddad write you a check on your birthday, even if he's on Social Security and you've held a real job for years now."

More information: The paper, "Does Solidarity in the Grandparent/Grandchild Relationship Protect Against Depressive Symptoms?," will be presented on Monday, Aug. 12, at 4:30 p.m. EDT in New York City at the American Sociological Association's 108th Annual Meeting.

Grandparents work to maintain grandchildren's position in England's Outdated Elitist Class system

Children's eventual position in England's outdated, discredited and elitist class system is closely linked to that of their grandparents, not just their parents, English researchers claim.

And where parents have "dropped down" the pseudo socio-economic ladder, the so-called "grandparents effect" often pulls them back up, their research suggests.

The passing on of wealth and property is thought to play some part in this, by supplementing the economic status of the family group.

Researchers at Oxford and Durham universities looked at data on the lives of more than 17,000 people.

Their study, published in the American Sociological Review, involved family groups born in 1946, 1958 and 1970 in England.

It says that among men with both parents and grandparents in the highest socio-economic group, 80% stayed in those positions when they were adults.

But among men whose parents had been upwardly mobile, only 61% stayed in the group they had been born in to.

Women excluded from elite groups
The researchers said that for women, the "grandparents effect" was less strong, with only 66% of women born in to the highest group staying there. Among women whose parents had moved up the ladder, 51% stayed there.

Mobility changes are classed as 'mistakes'
Where grandparents were from a, so-called, higher social class and the parents slipped down, the grandparents effect appeared stronger, "pushing the grandchild back up the social ladder", the researchers claimed.

In such cases there was "a higher level of social mobility, as though grandparents' class background was correcting the mobility 'mistake' made by the parents", they said.

Lead researcher Tak Wing Chan, from the elitist University of Oxford, said: "The grandparents effect in social mobility is found to operate throughout society and is not restricted to the top or bottom of the, so-called, English social elitist class structure.

"It works through a number of channels but mainly through the inheritance of wealth and property, and is aided by durable elitist institutions such as generation-skipping trusts, residential segregation, and other demographic processes.

"Our study reveals that grandparents have a substantial effect on where their grandchildren end up in the discredited English elite class system."

The report says the older generation is now more likely to be healthier and wealthier and more able to  help with childcare payments, as well as passing on financial advantages to grandchildren in the shape of property and savings.

There has been no study done on the detrimental affect that this additional and unplanned burden has on the grandparents future or whether they are able to sustain their achieved level of health and wealth throughout the years needed to support the extended family.

Sleep Standards are Slipping

Kids never got enough shuteye, even back in grandpa's day.

That's according to a century's worth of expert advice and sleep studies, which a team of researchers has now distilled into a brief report in the journal Pediatrics.

"There is a common belief that children are not getting enough sleep and that children's total sleep time has been declining," Lisa Anne Matricciani of the University of South Australia in Adelaide and colleagues write.

And while it's true that kids aren't getting as much sack time now as they were in the late 1800s, that doesn't mean experts weren't worried back then, too.

In fact, as the Australian researchers combed through older and older literature, the recommended sleep time was always a good half-hour higher than what kids, or their parents, said they got.

"No matter how much sleep children are getting, it has always been assumed that they need more," the team says.

So why are the standards slipping?

According to Matricciani and company, there just isn't any good science on which to base recommendations. They went through 32 sets of sleep advice, and only one provided any reasoning for its guidance: the actual sleep of 500 healthy kids.

Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH US) says adults commonly need between eight and eight and a half hours of sleep, whereas newborns should get 16 to 18 hours a day.

Children fall in between, with preschoolers needing 11 to 12 hours of slumber and older kids and adolescents 10 hours.

Those standards are based on how long people sleep when they're not interrupted but one expert reported that there is still little ironclad science behind the numbers.

"We need to do due diligence and do the nitty-gritty effort of measuring sleep in a large group of the population to find out what's normal," said Dr. David Gozal, an expert in childhood sleep problems at the University of Chicago. "That has never been done."

He went on, "If you don't know what's normal because you haven't measured it, then your recommendations are going to reflect what you believe is normal, although that's not necessarily correct."

That also explains why expert recommendations have been shifting downward over time, Gozal said, because physicians are influenced by changing societal expectations the same as everybody else.

"It only reflects the nature of our parental expectations," mused Gozal.

Based on 218 articles that contained self- or parent-reported sleep for children, the Australian researchers estimate that kids' actual sleep duration fell by 73 minutes over a century.

By comparison, recommended sleep times dropped by 71 minutes, but remained 37 minutes above the estimates of real sleep.

Like other researchers, Gozal blames our shorter nights on the accelerated pace of modern society with its 24-7 demands on parents and kids alike.

"The concern that kids aren't sleeping enough is real," he said. "More than 80 percent of parents need to wake up their kids, indicating that their kids don't get enough sleep."

Although it's next to impossible to prove conclusively that diminished shuteye is taking a toll on our health, several studies have linked it to a plethora of ailments, from obesity in American kids to attention problems in Korean high school students to heart disease around the globe.

"We are in fact reducing the amount of sleep as a society, and that is translating, at least in my mind, to an increased risk of many diseases," said Gozal.

So how do you know when your kid has had enough sleep?

"You will know that your child is sleeping enough if they wake up on their own rather than being awoken," Gozal advised. "If they don't get up on time, make them go to bed earlier."

SOURCE: bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online February 13, 2012.

For more good advice and support on how to solve children's sleep issues visit www.dream-angus.com

Grandparents: They can damage children during divorces, claim

David Norgrove, the chairman of an official UK review on family justice which is published today, said some couples used their parents as a “weapon” during contested divorce cases.

Check out the Executive Summary from the Family Justice Report

The comments came as Mr Norgrove unveiled plans for parents to go through more “do-it-yourself” divorces to speed up settlements.

He also confirmed plans that divorced fathers would be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children.

He said grandparents could be “extremely important in a child’s life” but some made problems worse during divorces by demanding the right to have contact with the children.

He said: “Grandparents can be used by parents as a way of getting at their ex-partner. Grandparents are not always straightforward in the way they behave and the result can be damage to children.

“There is no evidence that courts unreasonably refuse the ability of a grandparent to bring an application for contact with their grandchildren.”

Mr Norgrove continued: “Not all grandparents are good grandparents. One of the separating parents can use his or her parents as a weapon against the other partner.

“We should not be putting all the emphasis on the rights of the adults. The question is wrong: it should be what is in the best interests of the child, not what is right for the adults.”

Mr Norgrove’s 220-page review did not recommend any legal right for grandparents to see their grandchildren after a couple divorced. Instead they would continue to be able to apply for access through the courts.

More information on this article from the Telegraph