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Coping With Your Child’s Leukemia

ByDave Stopher

May 17, 2021

By Nyaka Mwanza

Your instinctive drive as a parent is to protect your child, cure what ails them, and eliminate the things in their life that may pose a threat. When facing a pediatric leukemia diagnosis, however, you may easily find yourself overwhelmed or outmatched and struggling to cope. Leukemia in children impacts those around the child, including parents, family, and friends, in significant ways. It’s critical that as a parent coping with your child’s cancer, you ensure that you’re looking after your own physical and emotional well-being while leading your child through their diagnosis and treatment.

Enlisting Help and Delegating

Caring for yourself and managing family life is hard enough as it is. Add in the mammoth burden of leukemia and it can all become too overwhelming. It’s important to know and accept that nobody can do it all alone, nor should they. Don’t be afraid to ask other parents, family members, friends, or neighbors for help. You might be surprised how supportive your communities and networks are.

As a parent, you also have a huge influence on how your child deals with their illness. Communicating well also models for your child how to express their needs and feelings and how to advocate for themselves. Good communication allows you to express yourself and help others understand your limits and needs as well as what your child is experiencing. Be specific about the type of support you need so that people can step in and help you effectively.

Seeking Out Emotional Support

It’s important to take care of yourself mentally and physically so that you can lend strong support when your child is living with or has survived leukemia. Understandably, your love for your child may drive you to help them in all ways possible, putting their well-being above your own. But the fact is that you’re a better caregiver if you’re rested and healthy rather than overextended or driven into the ground.

Enlisting help from your loved ones is just the start of coping. Just as your child needs specialized medical and psychological support, you’ll likely also need specialized support for yourself — particularly emotional support that can help you process feelings of guilt, anger, sadness, or any other complicated feeling that might arise in you. Consider seeing a therapist, either alone or as a family. Seek out support from social workers, nurses, or psychologists. Your child’s treatment team or institution will likely have several resources and referrals for family support.

Peer-to-peer support can also be helpful. Connecting with other people who have adapted to and learned from caring for a child with leukemia can provide an invaluable perspective, not to mention a well from which to draw strength. These sorts of connections shared by people who have endured the same challenges can be important for processing and coping with your own experiences as an individual and as a family. Peers can lend you much-needed support, share tips to make life easier, and offer guidance and perspective at all stages of your family battle with pediatric leukemia.

No matter how hard it may get, remember: You are not alone. There are many organizations that offer support to children and families facing leukemia and other cancers, as well.

Resources

  1. How to Cope When Your Child is Diagnosed with Cancer
  2. Leukemia in Children: Symptoms and Causes – MyLeukemiaTeam
  3. How to Communicate as a Caregiver – American Cancer Society