The adolescent's experience when a parent has advanced cancer: A qualitative inquiry

Background: Parental cancer is a stressful experience for young people, constituting a potential threat to physical and mental health and normative development. Currently, there is insufficient information describing the sources and nature of this distress during advanced parental cancer, especially concerning families with adolescent children.

Aim: To address the significant gap in the literature by providing the adolescent's perspective on the impact of their parent's advanced cancer on their lives.

Design: This qualitative study involved single-occasion, semi-structured elicitation interviews with adolescents whose parents were diagnosed with advanced stage cancer.

Setting/participants: The study sample consisted of seven adolescents from six families, five females and two males ranging in age from 11 to 15 years (mean = 13.6 years, standard deviation = 1.4 years). The ill parents consisted of four females and two males diagnosed with Stage IV cancer.

Results: The core construct that organized study results was Weaving a Normal Life with Cancer which involved five major domains: feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders; cancer changes everything; confronting or getting away from the cancer; talking about it; and cancer was a positive for me … it taught me.

Conclusion: Study findings shed light on how adolescents self-manage their parent's advanced cancer and work to delimit the illness even as they are aware of its constant presence. Future research and intervention studies are needed to support and add to the adolescents' self-management strategies to weave a normal life for themselves while in the throes of the cancer's uncertainty and challenges with family communication.