How children with cerebral palsy master bimanual activities from a parental perspective

Abstract

Background: During childhood, children learn the daily life activities they want and need to do. Children with unilateral spastic cerebral palsy often have difficulties performing activities requiring two hands.

Aim: To describe parental reasoning on how children with unilateral spastic cerebral palsy learn to master the performance of bimanual activities in everyday life.

Material and methods: Sixteen parents participated in focus groups, a qualitative research approach with its own methodological criteria and research methods.

Results: One overall theme emerged from the analysis: ‘Finding harmony between pleasure and effort is the key to learning’. This overall theme arose as a synthesis of four themes: ‘awakening of the inner drive’, ‘trying on one’s own’, ‘enabling things to work’ and ‘it must be worth the effort´. The parents described when an activity woke their children´s inner drive to perform. Their children also strived to develop their own way to perform an activity, sometimes with the support of others, still, some activities were not possible to learn.

Conclusions: Occupational therapists and others in the children’s environment have an important mission to support the children to find their own harmony between pleasure and effort and their individual key to success in learning bimanual everyday activities.

Keywords:

• Activity performance
• bimanual
• hand
• occupational therapy
• parent
• learning
• qualitative research method
• upper limb
• cerebral palsy

Acknowledgements

We would like to sincerely thank all the parents who participated in this study, and Marika Persson, occupational therapist, who assisted with the children during the focus group discussions.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was financially supported by the Petter Silfverskiöld Memorial Fund, the Swedish National Association for Disabled Children and Young People: the RBU Research Foundation, the Linnea and Josef Carlsson Fund, the Swedish Association of Occupational Therapists Scholarship Fund and the Fund Samariten.