Introduction: Child hospitalization is one of the sources of anxiety for both the child and his/her parents. Among the strategies for reducing anxiety, non-pharmacological strategies are as important as pharmacological. The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of educative story-books and face-to-face education on anxiety of hospitalized children and their mothers.

Methods: The research project had a quasi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test. The subjects consisted of 81 hospitalized children, aged six to nine years old and mothers in Sabzevar, who were not selected randomly by method. Data collection tools were demographic information questionnaire, Scale of Facial Self-Reported Anxiety and the State Anxiety Inventory. Data were analyzed using SPSS (version 20) and Descriptive Statistics, Shapiro-Wilk, Chi-Square, Paired Sample T Test, Wilcoxon, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal Wallis, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Honestly Significant Difference (HSD).

Results: After the intervention, the results of this study showed that there was a significant difference in anxiety of children, between the educative story-book group and routine group (P-value = 0.006). However, the differences between the educative story-book with face-to-face education groups and face-to-face education with routine groups were not significant (P-value > 0.05). There were significant differences in anxiety of mothers between the educative story-book with routine groups (P-value < 0.001) and face-to-face education group with routine group (P-value = 0.001). However, the difference between the educative story-book and face-to-face education groups was not significant (P-value = 0.079).

Conclusions: The results demonstrated that educative story-books and face-to-face education could reduce the mothers’ anxiety. It can be recommended as a popular, practical and efficient tool to prepare children for hospitalization.