• Posted February 20, 2026

Parents' 'Gut Feelings' Best Help Doctors Detect And Treat Serious Illness Among Children

Doctors would do well to heed any gut feelings parents might have about their child’s health, a new study says.

Nine times out of 10, children were seriously ill if their parents had a clear or strong concern about their health, researchers reported Feb. 17 in JAMA Network Open.

In fact, asking whether a parent is worried works better to identify seriously sick kids than comprehensive health questions focused on symptoms, researchers found.

“Parental concern is an important warning sign,” said lead researcher Dr. Hilla Pöyry, a pediatric specialist at the University of Oulu in Finland.

“If a parent is worried about the condition of their suddenly ill child, the child must have the opportunity to be assessed by a doctor,” Pöyry said in a news release. “A worried parent should not be left alone to make a remote assessment of their child’s condition.”

For the study, researchers tracked nearly 2,400 children and teens treated at the Oulu University Hospital’s ER. Parents completed an extensive 36-item questionnaire as part of their child’s treatment.

About 1 in 4 of the children had a severe illness requiring intensive care, surgery or a prolonged hospital stay, the study said.

The point was to see if the digital questionnaire could be a good tool for parents to use to assess the health of a sick child at home before heading to the ER.

However, the questionnaire was not accurate enough to replace an ER visit, especially if a parent was already concerned about their child’s health.

“Our results show that such tools require careful validation, and they do not yet replace the assessment of a health care professional,” Pöyry said.

Researchers found that items in the questionnaire related to parental worry were the best way to detect kids at greatest risk for serious illness.

One question alone accurately identified 91% of kids who turned out to be very sick: “As a parent, how worried are you about your child's health at the moment?”

“Although a parent may not always be able to describe the child’s symptoms in detail or accurately, they recognize a serious illness very well when asked a simple concern-based question,” Pöyry said.

However, these “gut feeling” questions weren’t very good at ruling out cases where a child wasn’t sick, the study found.

The best-performing question — “Do you feel your child is particularly ill or something is seriously wrong?” — identified healthy children only about 73% of the time.

The parental worry question identified healthy kids just 18% of the time, despite how well it worked at detecting children who were actually sick.

“While parental concern is an important red flag, it should be interpreted alongside clinical assessment to avoid unnecessary escalation of care,” the research team concluded in its paper.

More information

The American Academy of Pediatrics has more on when a child needs emergency medical services.

SOURCES: University of Oulu, news release, Feb. 18, 2026; JAMA Network Open, Feb. 17, 2026