How to Talk to Kids About Cancer
Better Strategies Needed to Help Children Cope With News That a Parent Has Cancer
WebMD News Archive
April 13, 2006 -- The words "you have cancer" will change anyone's world in an instant, but parents diagnosed with cancer face the extra challenge of helping their kids deal with the news.
What should I tell the kids? What should I leave out? How should I tell them? Parents facing a new cancer diagnosis are usually not prepared to answer these questions, and they need better support to help them, a new study suggests.
Researchers in Oxford, England, interviewed 37 mothers with a new diagnosis of breast cancer and 31 of their children between the ages of 6 and 18.
They found that even young children were much more aware of cancer as a life-threatening illness than their parents or other adults realized.
More Support Needed
The kids learned much of what they knew prior to their mother's diagnosis from television, public health campaigns, and the experiences of celebrities and adults they had known with cancer.
Because of this, many of the children associated the word cancer with death and would have benefited from more education about cancer in general and breast cancer specifically, the researchers concluded.
"Children who knew of someone else with cancer could mistakenly assume that their mother's experience would be the same," researcher Gillian Forrest and colleagues wrote in the April 14 online edition of the British Medical Journal.
"Parents are often unaware of how much their children know and, often reeling from the diagnosis themselves, may not be in the best position to decide what and how to tell them. Our results suggest that many parents would benefit from preparation to tell their children and consider the ways children at different developmental stages might react."
Tell the Truth
Cancer is not uncommon among women who are at the age where they are raising their children. The American Cancer Society reports that one in seven women in the U.S. will develop breast cancer during their lifetime, and roughly a quarter of them will do so while they still have children living at home.
When Wendy Schlessel Harpham, MD, learned she had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma 16 years ago, she and her husband faced the twin challenges of battling the disease and helping their three young children, then 5, 3, and 1, understand what was happening.