How is my child doing – parental understanding of their children when a parent has cancer

Abstract

Objectives:

To explore the difficulties parents face when understanding their children’s reactions to parental cancer and parents’ reactions to their children’s perceived needs.

Research approach:

Qualitative interviews with cancer patients and their partners.

Participants:

Eleven patients and seven partners took part. Their children were aged 1-15 years. Eight patients were mothers and cancer was diagnosed median 28 (7-104) months ago.

Methodological approach:

Inductive analysis with systematic text condensation.

Conclusions:

Parents were groping in the dark when understanding their children’s reactions. They observed signs of distress in their children, but often avoided communication about emotional reactions. We suggest parental difficulties in containing own and children’s emotions as an important cause for this situation.

Implications:

Parents lacked relevant support offers for the family as a unit. Identification of children’s difficulties cannot be based on parental evaluation alone. We suggest family support as part of standard care for patients with minor children.

Keywords:

• Pediatric
• qualitative
• family
• quality of life
• parenting

Ackowledgements

We sincerely thank all the parents who spend their precious time and energy with us and shared their experiences.

Conflicts of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a post-doctoral grant to Anette Hauskov Graungaard from the Novo Nordic Foundation (Grant number NNF14OC0008841) and was furthermore supported by funding from The Danish Cancer Society (grant number R62-A3972-12-S3)