Joint working relationships: children, parents and child healthcare nurses at work.

In child healthcare children's development is examined and assessed. The main aim of this article is to explore the different ways in which a child health nurse establishes joint working relationships with children and parents. Few studies in child healthcare include nonverbal interaction. It was found that a child often responds to the actions of the nurse and the parent by physical and bodily actions and by the direction of his/her gaze. The nurse has to be able to shift between several different interactional modes using various nonverbal communicative means. She uses her body to shift positions together with shifts in gaze in order to establish an interactional focus and a relationship with the child. The nurse also uses different artifacts in the room as well as the child's spontaneous activities during the assessment of the child's development. In addition, she uses the parents' relationships with their children in order to gain their support and to encourage their children in performing tasks. An important methodological consequence of this study is that it is necessary to use video-recorded data when interactions of this kind are analyzed.