Children's Adjustment to Parental Cancer

Abstract

There is growing empirical evidence that various child and family factors are associated with children's reactions to parental cancer. Children having parents with cancer may respond to parental cancer in different ways in terms of bonadjustment and maladjustment. Children's maladjustment to this pervasive stressor is manifested by a wide variety of physiologic, psychologic, and behavioral stress responses. To date, research on children's adjustment to parental cancer has focused almost exclusively on documenting children's adjustment problems and on describing simple, direct association between the characteristics of children and/or their families, and children's adjustment. The gap in research and clinical practice lies in the lack of a comprehensive model to illuminate children's coping with parental cancer and to guide intervention programs. Based on a synthesis of the literature, this article proposes a model that specifies the relationships among the stressor of having a parent with cancer, moderators and mediator variables, and adjustment. This model can serve as a basis for future research and intervention programs.

Parental cancer: Factors associated with children's psychosocial adjustment — a systematic review

“…Contrary to published clinical models [16] but in accordance with some previous reviews [10,11], illness-and treatment related variables show insufficient evidence. However, contrary to previous reviews and in accordance with theoretical frameworks [16], poorer prognosis and advanced cancer stage suggests worse adjustment in children [39,43]. and should be further investigated.…”

“…Despite a published theoretical framework [16], the included studies predominantly concentrated on explorative approaches. Hypothesis oriented testing were not frequently used.…”

“…The literature discusses a number of different aspects associated with children's psychosocial adjustment when a parent is physically ill [14,15], many with specific regard to parents diagnosed with cancer [8,[10][11][12]16].…”

Minor Children of Palliative Patients: A Systematic Review of Psychosocial Family Interventions

“…This also applies to studies on children of cancer patients in general, where intervention studies are mostly poorly constructed. 28,94 Methodological shortcomings include widely used cross-sectional designs, lack of control groups, heterogeneous questionnaires that cannot be easily compared, inconsistent treatment exposure, and overall, rather low participation rates. In one study, patients refused participation because of organizational and disease-related burdens, 89 which is perhaps a core feature of the population studied and may require flexibility on the part of therapists and researchers.…”

Effectiveness of a play-integrated primary one preparatory programme to enhance a smooth transition for children

“…Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) theory of cognitive appraisal, stress and coping is one of the most commonly used theoretical perspectives on how people cope with stress. This transactional model is also most frequently applied to research on children (Li et al, 2007(Li et al, , 2010bSu and Ryan-Wenger, 2007). According to Lazarus and Folkman, stress is defined as a dynamic ongoing relationship between the person and environment, and cognitive appraisal is the process by which an individual evaluates or judges a potentially stressful event for meaning and significance to well-being.…”