Paper: Qualitative interview study of communication between parents and children about maternal breast cancer
Editorial: Telling children about a parent's cancer
Most parents diagnosed with cancer avoid communicating with their children in the hope of preventing distress. Yet a paper in this week's BMJ suggests that parents need help to think about how they might talk to their children and how to deal with their reactions.
Jacqueline Barnes and colleagues interviewed 32 mothers of school age children, recently diagnosed with breast cancer, to explore why parents do or do not talk to their children about their illness and what help parents have received or might have liked. They found that women were most likely to begin talking to their children once a definite diagnosis was made, but a fifth of children had still not been told that their mother was ill at the stage of surgery. The most common reasons for not communicating was to avoid facing questions about cancer and death and preventing children's distress. One mother of a 9 year old stated: "He'll say …you've got cancer, are you going to die?" Another said: "I feel if I mentioned it to him he would just worry so much."
Only a minority of mothers had been offered any kind of help with breaking bad news to their children, say the authors. More support is needed to help parents think about whether, what and how to tell their children to avoid unnecessary anxiety within the family, they conclude.
In an accompanying editorial, Duncan Keeley, a general practitioner in Oxfordshire, emphasises the importance of talking to children about painful events, saying "that it is better to talk badly about things than not to talk about them at all." He suggests that general practitioners should be prepared to assist parents in helping their children to understand difficult or painful truths.
Contact:
[Editorial] Duncan Keeley, General Practitioner, The Health Centre, Thame, Oxfordshire OX9 3JZ