Abstract:
For parents of children with cancer, it is a struggle with the decision of whether or not and what to tell the child about their serious illness. Currently, most health personnel have encouraged parents to talk openly and honestly with their children in order to achieve better impacts on the childrens feelings and their compliance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how mothers inform their children of the illness and what they say. In addition, it is to examine the hypothesis that being openly informed about the illness is associated with the childs strengths. Through the nine months of data collection at The Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Pediatrics Faculty of Medicine, Siriraj Hospital, there were 69 patients, between the age of 8-15 years with childhood cancer, as well as their mothers or the main caregivers, who were willing to participate in the study. The participants were interviewed by using two separate questionnaires. The mothers questionnaire, was used to obtain demographic data and the ways they communicated with the child. The other questionnaire, with the child, was the translated VIAYOUTH (Park and Peterson, 2006) for assessing child strengths. Descriptive statistics, t-test and ANOVA were used to examine the association between the study variables. The findings revealed that most of the children were in the group of high and moderate strengths, and there was a significant association between strengths and being informed of the cancer as well as treatment status, diagnosis duration (months) and marital status of their parents (p<0.05). According to the results, the hypothesis that there should be informed open and honest dialogue about the illness to the childs patients where cancer might elevate the strengths in the child was accepted, and this could be of benefit to the communication among parents, health personnel and the child with cancer, as well as being effective counseling. However, the association shown in this study is not a causal one. Therefore, further studies should be designed to find the cause.