A Resilience Promotion Program for Parents of Children With Cancer
A Resilience Promotion Program for Parents of Children With Cancer
Cancer is a leading cause of death for children. With the increasing incidence of childhood cancer, the mental health problems emerge in those parents struggle with their children's life-threatened disease. Caring for children with cancer is described as life-changing experience and overwhelming stress for parents. Many studies have been conducted to screen the psychological distress for these parents and found a considerable percentage of them suffering from depressive symptoms. Poorer quality of life was also found in parents of children with cancer when compared to parents of children without cancer. Additionally, parental distress interacted with children's emotions and could have detrimental effects on children's both physical and mental health. Therefore, it is important to take measures improving the mental health for parents of children with cancer.
Although current various psychological interventions illustrated small to moderate improvements of mental health for parents of children with cancer, the total effect base on a systematic review was not statistically significant. The purpose of these interventions was predominantly to treat negative mental health problems such as depression and no recognized effective psychological interventions were available for parents of children with cancer until now. Along with the paradigm shift from problem-oriented approach to nurturing strengths in the post-modern period, instead of exclusively treating mental health problems, researchers payed more attention to positive therapy such as resilience promotion program. Resilience usually refers to the ability to adapt adverse conditions and maintain positive status. Resilience studies are mounting since the flourishing of positive psychology movement and meaningful results were gained from corresponding intervention program concentrating on resilience promotion in adolescent education, handling chronic disease and recovery of breast cancer. However, there is a lack of targeted resilience promotion program for parents of children with cancer. The results of our pilot study showed low levels of resilience in parents of children with cancer and strong associations among parental resilience, quality of life and depression. It indicates that the increase in resilience can benefit for the mental health of parents. Therefore, a resilience promotion program will be conducted to examine efficacy for parents of children with cancer.
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