But in order to adequately help our children during times of crisis and both physical and emotional pain, we need to examine what pain is, its causes and types and its “cures”. Parents are a child’s first teachers in life. We are also our child’s first teachers about pain. What is pain?

Pain is a subjective sensation. What may be painful to one person or child may not be as painful to another. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.” Pain is the body’s signal that it has been injured or that something is wrong. So, in essence, pain can be good, but it can also interfere with our lives and our bodies’ functioning.

Sometimes diagnosing a child’s pain can be difficult, especially in infants and younger children. The only authority on a child’s pain is the injured child; just as the only authority on an adult’s pain is the injured adult. We cannot feel another’s pain; we can only read his verbal and nonverbal cues to understand the intensity he is feeling. We need to keep this in mind when we are treating our child’s injury.

Scientists and psychologists have studied pain for years. Back in the seventeenth century the philosopher Rene Descartes believed that the mind and body were separate entities, therefore creating misconceptions about pain, saying that our thoughts and feelings had no influence on our pain. Even in more recent years, researchers and doctors did not believe infants and children could feel intense pain because they were neurologically immature, and that their cries and screams were caused by fear. In the 1930s the prevalent mindset was that if a doctor gave an infant a sugar sucker, no anesthesia was needed during surgery, whether that surgery was a circumcision or for something more life-threatening. We, as a society and as researchers, have come a long way since then, but only recently. In 1985 in Washington D.C., baby Jeffrey Lawson was born prematurely and needed heart surgery. Doctors gave the baby the proper anaesthetic analgesia, but he received no post-operation pain medications. Baby Jeffrey died shortly after surgery, and during this landmark case, it was proved he died from the intensity of the pain.