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    How to Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness: Supportive, Practical Advice from a Leading Child Life Specialist
    How to Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness: Supportive, Practical Advice from a Leading Child Life Specialist
    How to Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness: Supportive, Practical Advice from a Leading Child Life Specialist
    Ebook344 pages5 hours

    How to Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness: Supportive, Practical Advice from a Leading Child Life Specialist

    By Kathleen McCue, M.A., C.C.L.S. and Ron Bonn

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    About this ebook

    How to Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness has become the standard work on an important subject. A classic for over fifteen years, it continues to be a go-to book for supportive, practical advice, based on the lifetime experience and clinical practice of one of America 's leading child life practitioners.

    Fully revised and updated, this new edition also explores the major issues and developments from the last decade that affect children today, including the dangers and opportunities of the Internet, a deeper understanding of how hereditary diseases affect children, the impact of the nation's explosive growth in single-parent families, and new insights into how family trauma and a parent's mental illness may affect children.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 16, 2011
    ISBN9781429991193
    How to Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness: Supportive, Practical Advice from a Leading Child Life Specialist
    Author

    Kathleen McCue, M.A., C.C.L.S.

    Kathleen McCue, M.A., C.C.L.S., is supervisor of the child life program at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and past president of the National Child Life Council, her profession's international association. She is co-author of How to Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

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      Book preview

      How to Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness - Kathleen McCue, M.A., C.C.L.S.

      Introduction

      This book began without any of us realizing it.

      As resident child life specialist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, I’d get a call, usually from the intensive care unit:

      A child has come in, seen his mother or father lying in a bed, pale as death, hooked into a battery of life-support drips and monitors, and the child has gone berserk, run screaming down the corridor. Could I come?

      Or the child is sitting stiff and silent outside the ICU, refusing to speak. Could I come?

      Or the child is behaving perfectly well, only the nurse thinks he should be crying his heart out. Could I come?

      These things happened again and again; they happen in every big hospital. But gradually we came to realize:

      As surely as the parents of sick and dying children need help and support, the children of very sick parents need help and support. Yet while almost every good hospital has a continuing program for parents of sick children, there didn’t seem to be any programs to help children whose mothers or fathers were seriously ill.

      With all our advanced techniques for treating serious disease, for saving or prolonging life, we in medicine have forgotten one very important affected group: the children of our patients.

      We have a great deal of knowledge about children and stress. Yet there was no organized effort to pass that knowledge on to the parents, to help them help their children.

      In most hospitals no counselor, no manual, was routinely at hand to tell parents what to expect from their children and to work with the children, from the moment of diagnosis through months or years of a parent’s treatment. There was no continuous guidance on how to address children’s questions and fears, from the darkest puzzlings about separation, change, pain, and death, to the most mundane worries of Who’ll tuck me in? How will I get to soccer practice?

      There was no day-to-day counseling for the sick or the well parent on how to interpret their children’s conduct and how to help children who were showing signs of trouble. What is normal? What is dangerously not normal? What signs can you look for? What warnings do children give? What can you say and do to maintain the mental and emotional health of your children through months or years of medical crisis, no matter what the final outcome?

      YOUR CHILDREN: PART OF YOUR TREATMENT

      Out of that realization has come first our program and now this book.

      From 1987 until 1995, if you, a parent, were admitted to The Cleveland Clinic with a serious or life-threatening illness, then as part of your treatment, at no additional charge, your children were entitled to our continuing services in the Child Life Program. Over those nine years we worked with hundreds of families. We helped well over a thousand normal children survive and prevail through a terribly abnormal situation in their lives.

      In September 1995, this program was changed—another casualty of the general downsizing of medical care delivery in America. Although still committed in spirit to the needs of these youngsters, Child Life services for the children of severely ill adults are now available only on a very limited, consulting basis. As a result of continuing requests, a new program is now being discussed that would once again make our program available to help children of very sick parents. However, in order to survive the threats of cost containment, there will be a charge to families using the program.

      Yet even when the children of Cleveland Clinic patients still had access to our free Child Life program, for other parents across America the problem remained: There was no guidance on how to bring their children through these devastating family medical crises. Even in our institution, parents had nothing in print they could routinely consult whenever they wondered about their children’s reactions, their emotional well-being.

      What was needed, I felt, was a manual—a book that would summarize the very best of our own and others’ expertise, and guide Mom and Dad step by step through all the many turnings of how children respond to a parent’s serious illness.

      Perhaps, as you read this, you are thinking, "She’s not really talking to me. My illness is treatable, it’s curable." Please think again. If the illness is serious, if it will change you in some way, if it is causing you high levels of worry or stress, then it will affect your children.

      Most of you who read this will survive your medical crisis, and return to a full, normal life. For you the aim of this book is to bring you and your children through even stronger, united, and ready to challenge the future. But please indulge me for just one moment: I want to tell you a story that involves a death. I tell it now, because it seems to me to make two vital points:

      1. Even in the face of ultimate tragedy, children can be prepared, can weather the trauma, can emerge whole and healthy and ready to go on with

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