Communicating with Children as a Key Public Health Strategy

In this presentation from the 137th American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States), Renata Schiavo explores why communicating with children is a key public health strategy. She cites benefits for both children's health - building a strong foundation for healthy habits, preventing risk behaviours, and empowering children to master health-related decisions over their lifetime - and community and family health - capitalising on children's ability to cut across age groups, literacy and socioeconomic levels, and cultural and ethnic boundaries, as well as influencing health and social behaviour at community, family, school, and other social levels by helping prevent disease/risk behaviours and contributing to making public health emergency preparedness commonplace.

Schiavo's discussion of this dual strategy is based on the Adult-Child Influence Paradigm she developed (Schiavo, 2009), which is bidirectional in that it recognises that:

• Parents, families, schools, and communities can influence children's health behaviour.
• Children need repetition and consistency to master behaviours and feel safe. Adults are often reminded of health behaviours because of this need.
• Peer influence and socialisation values that shape children may in turn cause change in parental/adult values.
• Parents, family, schools, and communities react to children's demands and needs by modelling, reinforcing, or attempting to change behaviours and/or assuming new values/behaviours.
  

Based on this paradigm, Schiavo asserts that communicating with children about their health has potential benefits for them, such as: development of key cognitive, language, and motor skills; early formation of good health habits; disease and risk behaviour prevention; increased comfort with medical care; encouraging pre-adolescent and adolescent cooperation/ compliance with care and/or recommended health behaviours; and removing taboos by increasing children's comfort level with difficult topics and building a strong foundation for good mental health.

In turn, when children are the "audience" of health communication efforts, they are well poised to influence the lives of adults in their families and communities - as other authors have shown that children already do through day-to-day interactions - in areas including: parental health, adults' activities, parental employment status, use and availability of family financial resources, parent's intimate relationships, parents' interactions, parents' community interactions, parental personal development, parents' life plans, adults' feeling of having control over one's life, and parents' values, attitudes, and beliefs systems (Bigner, J.J., 2006).

Schiavo argues that communicating with children has had recognised impact on children's health in areas such as: healthful eating and obesity prevention, reduced depressive symptoms among pre-adolescents, substance abuse prevention, and late onset of sexual activity/sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and early pregnancy. On the flip side, this communication strategy can positively influence parents and other adults in children's lives. In fact, children's documented impact on parents' habits and health behaviour already includes such as areas as parents' eating/dining out habits, mental health, smoking behaviour, purchasing habits, and family dynamics/relationships/decision-making process.