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