Understanding pediatric communication techniques is important for all nurses as they will most likely work with children in their nursing career. Being aware of the specialized pediatric communication techniques will be an asset to any nurse’s practice as it will better facilitate communication. Communication is used to gather information, to teach, and to reduce anxiety. A focus of this paper is to review pediatric communication techniques that work best for infants, toddlers, and preschool children. Another focus is identifying what is developmentally appropriate language recognition and acquisition. Communication techniques are based on many factors; however the most important is the child’s developmental …show more content…
A three year old should have a vocabulary of 900 words and by the age of five should have a vocabulary of 2,100 words. The preschool child starts producing four to five word sentences; however, there may be some incorrect grammar. The preschooler should be able to understand and classify objects by category, like soup and fire are hot things. Some preschoolers start learning how to read (Hockenberry & Wilson, 2013).
Many children in their preschool years are egocentric; they only care about how they perceive the world. Other viewpoints do not matter to them, and when explaining things to preschoolers they should be the focus (Hockenberry & Wilson, 2013). Play becomes extremely important for language development; it is especially important during the preschool years as they start to synthesize aspects of prior langue. As they start to synthesize language they are able to articulate more complex ideas later in childhood (Boucher, Lewis, Lupton, & Watson, …show more content…
By knowing the child’s developmental age, the nurse should be able to use developmentally appropriate pediatric communication techniques to engage children at different ages into conversations. The most important thing to improve language recognition and acquisition is verbally communicating with the child; this can be accomplished by reading, playing, and providing the child with other verbal stimuli. For infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, have the parents involved as much as possible during the health assessment. Recognize that toddlers are capable of gesturing and using simple terms which can help with identification and location of pain. When working with preschoolers get on their level, explain what procedures are going to be done, and be truthful. With these pediatric communication tips in mind, a nurse can be very effective at their