JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting

Since 2020, peoples’ lifestyles have been largely changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. In the medical field, although many patients prefer remote medical care, this prevents the physician from examining the patient directly; thus, it is important for patients to accurately convey their condition to the physician. Accordingly, remote medical care should be implemented and adaptable home medical devices are required. However, only a few highly accurate home medical devices are available for automatic wheeze detection as an exacerbation sign.

Abusive head trauma (AHT) is a serious health problem affecting more than 3000 infants annually in the United States. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that health care providers counsel new parents about the dangers of AHT. Previous studies demonstrate that parental education is effective at reducing AHT events. South Carolina law requires hospitals to offer all new parents with the opportunity to watch an educational video about AHT. This mandate is addressed in different ways at the several delivery centers within a large South Carolina health care system with a range of viewing methods utilized, from DVD players to mobile workstations to personal devices. Frequent technical barriers and workflow inefficiencies resulted in low rates of compliance with this mandate at several campuses. To improve compliance of parent viewing of this educational video, the health care system standardized video viewing protocol across all campuses by implementing the use of iPads for parental education. Existing literature suggests that patient education can be improved in the hospital setting by utilizing tablet computers, but our literature search identified a gap in research around the education of parents and caregivers during hospitalization for childbirth. We used the implementation of an iPad-based parental education delivery protocol to evaluate whether tablet computers can improve compliance with delivering new parent education in the hospital setting.

There is a need for interventions that promote healthy decision making among adolescents and leverage the ongoing impact of parental relationships through older adolescence and young adulthood. These interventions should maximize adolescent engagement and be easily accessible to families in terms of cost, duration, and logistics related to participation.

Resilience is a person’s mental ability to deal with challenging situations adaptively and is a crucial stress management skill. Psychological resilience and finding ways to cope in crises is a highly relevant topic considering the COVID-19 pandemic, which enforced quarantine, social distancing measures, and school closures worldwide. Parents and children are currently living with increased stress due to COVID-19. We need to respond with immediate ways to strengthen children’s resilience. Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy interventions for children's stress management overcome accessibility issues such as the inability to visit mental health experts owing to COVID-19 movement restrictions. An interactive learning environment was created, based on the preventive program “Friends,” to overcome accessibility issues associated with delivering cognitive behavioral therapy–based interventions in formal and informal education settings.

Child screen time (ST) has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic as lockdowns and restrictions have forced changes to regular family routines. It is important to investigate how families are navigating ST.

Home is a vulnerable place for accidental child injuries. Unintentional injuries are a leading cause of death, hospitalization, and disabilities. These injuries are considered preventable and if not tackled, they will continue to be a persisting problem. Smartphones have become increasingly important in our everyday life and is an important tool not only for communication but also for other purposes—they have apps that can be used for various purposes. Therefore, an app-based intervention (ChildSafe) was developed to assess and reduce child injury at home.

Web-based sources of health information are widely used by parents to support healthy parenting and aid in decision making about their infants’ health. Although fraught with challenges such as misinformation, if used appropriately, web-based resources can improve access to health education and promote healthy choices. How Indigenous mothers use web-based information to support their parenting and infants’ health has not yet been investigated; however, web-based modalities may be important methods for mitigating the reduced access to health care and negative health care interactions that many Indigenous people are known to experience.

Parents’ awareness of the risks of the overuse of smartphones (SPs) among their children and parents’ attitudes toward this societal phenomenon are crucial factors to consider when investigating the causes and effects of, as well as interventions to control, this public health issue.

The tendency of parents to consume alcohol during the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be moderated by pandemic-related stress combined with the ongoing demands of childcare and home-based education, which are reported to be more burdensome for females than males.

Collecting longitudinal data during and shortly after pregnancy is difficult, as pregnant women often avoid studies with repeated surveys. In contrast, pregnant women interact with certain websites at multiple stages throughout pregnancy and the postpartum period. This digital connection presents the opportunity to use a website as a way to recruit and enroll pregnant women into a panel study and collect valuable longitudinal data for research. These data can then be used to learn new scientific insights and improve health care.

Type 1 diabetes management can be challenging for children and their families. To address psychosocial concerns for parents of youth with type 1 diabetes, we developed two parent-focused interventions to reduce their diabetes distress and fear of hypoglycemia. Our team conducted several of these interventions during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and recognized a need to make timely adjustments to our interventions. In this viewpoint article, we describe our experience conducting these manualized treatment groups during the pandemic, the range of challenges and concerns specific to COVID-19 that parents expressed, and how we adjusted our approach to better address parents’ treatment needs.

Electronic medication monitoring (EMM) is a digital tool that can be used for tracking daily medication use. Previous studies of EMM in asthma management have been conducted in adults or have examined pediatric interventions that use EMM for less than 1 year. To understand how to improve EMM-enhanced interventions, it is necessary to explore the experiences of parents of children with asthma, recruited from outpatient practices, who completed a 12-month intervention trial.