Asthma Self-Management for School-Age Children

School-age children face many challenges when a chronic illness is present. Understanding normal school-age development, including a need for increasing independence and mastery of skills, as well as cognitive ability, lay the foundation for teaching self-management skills to school-age children with asthma. The purpose of this paper is to highlight normal maturational development of school-age children that supports an approach to teaching them to manage their asthma, including promoting adherence to the child's treatment regimen. A new model for encouraging children's performance of the recommended self-management behaviors is proposed. This contingency management model, guided by cognitive social learning theory, is a set of behavioral strategies to support behavioral change for school-age children with asthma. Implementation of the model resulted in improved asthma treatment adherence and health outcomes for school-age children when the targeted self-management behavior was daily peak flow monitoring.