Telephone-Based Educational Intervention in Improving Communication Between Patients With Stage 0-III Cancer and Their Children

Enhancing Connections Telephone Program: A Cancer Education Program for Parents

This pilot clinical trial studies the feasibility of a telephone-based educational intervention in improving communication between patients with stage 0-III cancer and their children. An educational program delivered by telephone may help parents talk with their school-age child about their cancer.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVES:

I. Test the feasibility of the recruitment and study protocol.

II. Evaluate the short-term impact of the program on the diagnosed parents' and the parent's perceptions of their children's adjustment using a within group design (pre-posttest design).

III. To compare outcomes from the telephone-delivered program with outcomes obtained from the in-person program (between group design).

OUTLINE:

Participants complete the Enhancing Connections Telephone Program comprising 5, 1 hour educational telephone sessions over 3 months. During session 1, parents receive help defining the child's experience with the cancer as distinct from their own and ways to manage their own cancer-related emotions so that they do not emotionally flood the child. During session 2, parents receive assistance with developing skills to deeply listen and attend to the child's thoughts and feelings, complementing the parent's tendency to be a teacher, not a deep listener, of the child's thoughts, concerns, worries or understandings. During session 3, parents receive additional communication and parenting skills enabling them to initiate difficult cancer-related conversations and also interact with an upset child or one who is not forthcoming. During session 4, parents receive help focusing on and non-judgmentally interpreting the child's ways of coping with the cancer. It includes exercises that assist the parent to relinquish negative assumptions about the child's behavior related to the parent's cancer. Concurrently the session offers the ill parent ways to elicit their child's report of what the parent can do to assist the child cope with the child's cancer-related pressures. During session 5, parents focus on the gains they made in prior sessions and what they have accomplished, in their own words, in parenting their child about the cancer. The session also assists the ill parent to identify available resources that can be used after program completion to maintain the parent's newly acquired gains from the program.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Parents will be eligible if they have an initial diagnosis of non-metastatic cancer of any type (stage 0-3), including melanoma, colorectal, cervical, leukemia, lymphoma or breast cancer within the past 7 months
• Read and write English among their languages of choice
• Have ready access to a telephone
• Have a child 5-12 years old living at home who has been told their parent's cancer diagnosis
• The child is living at home and does not have learning challenges
• No prior malignancy is allowed except for adequately treated basal (or squamous cell) skin cancer