The relationship between preoperative anxiety level of 9-16 years old children that elective surgery is planned and their mother's attitude

Anxiety is a feeling of discomfort, fear, annoyance which happens with a worry of something bad is going to happen and the reason why it happens is unknown. The decision of if surgical procedure is necessary or not is a very important factor that puts both children and their family in stress. The patient is afraid and feels anxious because he/she will be operated and he/she doesn't know what's going to happen. The most important factor that determines child's undestanding of himself/herself and the world and his/her reactions to events is his/her parents' attitudes. Parents' attitudes are very important for child to form a positive personality. There are several classifications about parents' attitudes. Generally parents' attitudes of raising their child are clasified as overprotective, over giving permission, repressive-authoritarian, unstable-hesitant-careless and democratic attitude. In our study; we aimed to search the relationship between preoperative anxiety level of 9-16 years old children that elective surgery is planned and their mother's attitude. In our study, we administered State and Trait Anxiety Inventory which consists of 20 questions to totally 64 children who applied Manisa Celal Bayar University Faculty of Medicine's anesthesia policlinic and who will be operated. 26 of the children were girls and 38 of them were boys. And we administered Parents Attidute Research Instrument (PARI) that consists of 60 questions to children's mothers. We compared two independent mean Student t Tests, more than two independent mean ANOVA Tests, and after all we compared them with post-hoc Tukey test. In our study, we found that children's trait anxiety level increases paralelly with their anxiety of state. Besides, we found that when overprotective attitude increases permanent anxiety level also increases. When democratic and equality attitude decreases anxiety of state increases. Also we found that in families whose socio economic income is low and parents' whose education level is low overprotective attitude increases and when father's age and number of brothers and sisters increases democratic and equality attitude decreases. By inspecting parents' negative attitudes of children who will be operated, factors that will increase child's preoperative anxiety level should be determined. In preoperative period parents should be informed sufficiently, the negative attitudes of parents have to be decreased by giving education programmes and thus the preoperative anxiety of child should be reduced by decreasing the anxiety that is reflected to child. Thereby, preoperative-perioperative-postoperative complications, postoperative pain, analgesic usage, time of staying in hospital, cost of treatments and child's postoperative negative attitudes should be decreased. With this study, we intended to enlighten and guide the families, medical personnel and educators.