PAEDIATRIC NURSING
Parent education, family health promotion and health maintenance have been the concern of yesterday's and today's nurses. Florence Nightingale over a hundred years ago claimed that the art of family health nursing of which parent education is a part, is as important as the art of sick nursing. Paediatric is by its nature a family oriented speciality. Families have the most powerful enduring influence on
children. Parents have the major responsibility for promoting children's growth and development. Parenting is a challenging, long standing and gratifying experience. All families experience, periods of stress, confusion and frustration. During these times many families look to others for comfort and guidance. Parents are increasingly turning to paediatric nurses and paediatricians for advice and support for wide variety of medical, emotional, developmental and behavioural concerns. Your responsibility as a paediatric nurse is to help the families, develop their own compentence and to find their own enduring solutions, but as the needs of families grow in complexity and number, you have a crucial role to play in caring children and helping the families.
Parent education specifically is seen as a vehicle for giving consumers power and competence in making educated and creative decisions related to family life. Parent education offers you an opportunity to use your knowledge of family system theory, growth and development, communication skills, group process, leadership, assessment, problem-solving, teaching and learning theories and parenting. You as a health educator have to focus on parent education as a means to foster meeting, satisfying relationships among family members, as well as to promote the development of a productive future generation of adults.