Mothers' fear, their children's well-being in hospital, and the study of illness behavior.

Attempts to identify problems connected with the hospitalization ofyoung children have usually focused on the children themselves and paid little attention to the children's parents. Nevertheless there is ample support in the literature for the commonsense notion that parents, and especially mothers, may suffer extreme distress over their children's illness, hospitalization, and surgery (Skipper, 1966; Mechanic, 1964), and that their relationship with the child at this time plays a significant part in the child's social and psychological adjustment to the hospital situation (Jensen and Comly, 1948). This paper makes a number of tentative propositions about the relationship between fear and certain attitudes and actions in the fear situation, and discusses some of the implications of this relationship, first for the well-being of young children in hospital and secondly for the study of illness behaviours.