Injury-related fear-avoidance and symptoms of posttraumatic stress in parents of children with burns

• Parents whose children had more severe burns had more fear-avoidance beliefs.
• Fear-avoidance contributes to parents’ symptoms of PTSD.
• Fear-avoidance contributes to poorer health ratings regarding the child.
• Parents’ health, injury severity, and child comorbidity did not explain health ratings.
• Parental fear-avoidance should be addressed to minimize vicarious learning.

Parents of children with burns experience a range of psychological reactions and symptoms, and parents’ health is known to impact children's health. So far, there is little research into potential mechanisms that maintain parents’ symptoms. The aim was to investigate parental injury-related fear-avoidance, and its associations with injury severity and health measures. Parents (n = 107) of children aged 0.4–18 years that sustained burns 0.1–9.0 years previously completed questionnaires on fear-avoidance, posttraumatic stress, and health of the child. Analyses showed that the average level of fear-avoidance was low and positively associated with measures of injury severity and parents’ symptoms of posttraumatic stress, and negatively associated with parents’ ratings of their child's health. In two separate multiple regressions with parents’ symptoms of PTSD and the child's health as dependent variables, fear-avoidance made the largest contribution in both models while injury severity was non-significant. Results were not related to comorbid conditions of the child, scarring, or parent-related socio-demographic variables. In summary, injury-related fear-avoidance is more likely among parents whose children sustain more severe burns. In turn, fear-avoidance contributes significantly to parents’ symptoms of PTSD and to poorer health ratings regarding the child, irrespective of injury severity or child comorbidity.