It’s important to understand the beliefs of parents and younger children about what’s going to happen with their treatment. This is often the first time they have experienced a treatment or procedure and they may worry what it will be like or worry it will be worse than it is. For example, some young children have said to me that they think they are going to not wake up from ‘going to sleep’ when they are having an anaesthetic as their pet was ‘put to sleep’. We need to understand what younger children think so that we can attend to this to reassure them. I sometimes say “You are going to have a nice deep sleep and you can tell us all about your dreams when you wake up later today”.