Self-Care at School: Perceptions of 6-Year-Old Children

Abstract

Occupational therapists who work with young children routinely evaluate self-care and consider it an important domain of practice. Little is known about what children perceive is important self-care or what they experience as self-care within a school context. Without knowledge about children's perspectives of self-care, occupational therapists cannot know whether or not they are targeting areas that are central to children's needs. The purpose of this naturalistic study was to explore 6-year-old children's perceptions of self-care in their school day. Participant observation and group interviewing were used to elicit descriptive information from 24 Grade One children, attending an elementary school located in Sydney, Australia. A fishing game, drawing activity, and excerpts from a videotape of their day at school were used as stimuli to explore how the children described and attributed meaning to their self-care occupations. Findings showed that children described self-care at school two ways. First, they named specific self-care tasks that mirrored adult views of self-care and represented culturally shared views of the concept of self-care across ages. Second, children described highly individual views about self-care that were derived from their own experience of doing self-care at school. These views seemed to be based on their personal perceptions of salient factors in operation at the time of self-care performance such as social and physical contexts, perceived skill, and expectations of others. The findings suggest that occupational therapy assessment and intervention for self-care include sensitivity to experiential differences between adult views of self-care and those of children. This sensitivity should include an attempt to understand children's experiences of self-care in specific contexts such as school.

How does asthma influence the daily life of children? Results of focus group interviews

“…Next, the children were asked to make a drawing about something they felt was related to their asthma. The moderator used the drawings for the facilitation of the discussion during the first session [ 18 , 19 ]. In the second session, the discussion was facilitated by a fishing rod game with visual cues of the five domains of HRQL to introduce different dimensions of HRQL [ 19 ].…”

“…The moderator used the drawings for the facilitation of the discussion during the first session [ 18 , 19 ]. In the second session, the discussion was facilitated by a fishing rod game with visual cues of the five domains of HRQL to introduce different dimensions of HRQL [ 19 ]. Based on domain cards that were fished out by the children, children were asked to think about HRQL issues that were related to these domains.…”

iPad applications that required a range of motor skills promoted motor coordination in children commencing primary school

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“…After obtaining a card, each child was invited to answer the question on the card either directly, through story telling of specific instances at school and home or by acting out a response. This methodology has been successful in previous research that sought to obtain young children's perceptions of others at school (Chapparo & Hooper, ). The second part of the group interview involved role‐play.…”