Rutja Phuphaibul

Negative and positive adaptive behaviors of Thai school-aged children who have a sibling with cancer

It is a difficult situation for any child who has to set aside some of his or her own personal needs to help an ill sibling. Thus, the child who is experiencing childhood cancer in the family should not be perceived as an external victim of the situation. The child is an insider who is able to adapt and respond to the situation in the family. The nursing care of the family ought to examine and prevent the adverse effects of the situation by providing advice and counseling to parents, as well as to the sibling of the child with cancer. Maintaining positive adaptive behaviors can be achieved by recognition and admiration by parents, grandparents, and health-care providers.

Consistency analysis of parenting styles in Thailand during children's first year.

This descriptive study identifies and examines the consistency of parenting styles during the first year of their childrens lives. The data were collected from interviewing 4088 parents or primary care takers of the 6 month old infants during the third wave of data collection of The Prospective Cohort of Thai Children project. The instrument used was the Infant Parenting Styles Questionnaire, developed by the researchers, which reflected parental responses to infant care in five different situations. After the answers were categorized into controlling, reasoning, overprotection, and neglectful parenting styles, the weighted kappa was used for the consistency analysis. The findings revealed that during the first 6 months of life, the overprotection style was the most common, followed by the reasoning style. The controlling and neglectful styles were very seldom used. The consistency of the parental styles in the same care givers using the kappa values showed that agreement between each of the styles was very low (-0.0419 to 0.0688). This suggests that parenting styles during the first year of life seem to occur in random patterns.