What Do My Children Need?
Children require continuous satisfaction of their basic physical and emotional needs. You have to provide food and shelter, transportation to school and after-school activities, love, and comfort for their hurts.
Your children have to understand what they see going on around them, on their level. They will try to understand why you are tired or why you are still going for checkups, whether you talk about it or not.
Your children need reassurance that their needs will be met. Although their concerns may pale next to yours, fulfilling them offers great stability. Birthday parties may feel like a stressful inconvenience to you, but they are important to your children. Postponing or canceling these celebrations would disappoint them and could cause them anxiety by conveying the message that something is seriously wrong.
Remembering these three basic needs will help you prioritize your responsibilities to your children, and find the right words to comfort and reassure them:
• satisfaction of their physical and emotional needs
• a truthful explanation, appropriate to their age, of what is going on
• reassurance that their needs will be met
Do I Have to Tell Them the Truth?
It is crucial that you tell your children the truth, in order that they can trust you. The importance of this trust is amplified by the uncertainties and stress surrounding your health. Children are resilient and can handle challenge, loss, and uncertainty. They can accept your losing a body part or function, needing ongoing treatment, or living with a chance of recurrent cancer. When they see you as the same loving, caring parent despite physical changes, they are learning a powerful lesson about the value of the inner self and the triviality of appearances. Telling white lies to protect them (“My cancer cannot come back”) handicaps them by making their world unreliable and untrustworthy.
Good communication with you is your children’s best defense against frightening news stories or people’s gossip that may give wrong information about cancer and about your condition.
If you achieve remission, you would naturally like to reassure your children that your cancer will never come back. This would seem to protect the children from worrying about recurrence, as well as to help you believe that you are going to stay well. Unless you have a 100 percent guarantee that you will not have a recurrence, you are taking a risk that can destroy the foundation of trust between you and your child. If you ever develop recurrent cancer, or your child learns that most cancers have a chance of recurrence, you will either have to continue the lie or admit to having provided erroneous information. It will be less stressful for you to help your children adjust to the truth than to maintain an untruth and worry about being exposed.
You can minimize your children’s fear and anxiety about the truth by choosing how much you tell them and how you tell them. If you explain, “The cancer is gone. My doctors think that it won’t come back. If it does, I’ll get more treatment. There might be a new, easier way to treat it by that time, too. I’m going to plan on its not coming back, but if it does, I’ll be ready to be treated again. We dealt with my cancer this time, and we can deal with it again,” you offer truth, comfort, and hope in the same breath. This is the key to communication with children.
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