When Mom has cancer: Dad and teens struggle to cope

My daughter Maya is in the family room watching TV. I’m heading out to buy ginger candies for my wife, Marsha, who’s upstairs in bed, feeling queasy after her latest round of chemotherapy.

“Going to get something for Mom; be right back,” I call to my 15-year-old.

“How is she doing?” asks Maya.

In my head I think: “Why don’t you ask her yourself since she is just one flight of stairs away!” But I bite my tongue. I don’t want to add to the tension that cancer has already brought to our home.

Looking back, I realize that Maya wasn’t the only family member to avoid direct communication during the seemingly endless months of treatment for Marsha’s breast cancer. Consumed with all things cancer, my wife and I never asked her and her younger sister, Daniela, who was 13 at the time: “How are you guys doing?”

Many families find themselves in a similar situation: parent with cancer, teens in the house, not a lot of cross-generational conversation. Nearly 3 million American children live with a parent who is a cancer survivor. Roughly a third of those kids are 13 to 17 years old. While parents pay a lot of attention to the needs of younger kids, they may figure, as we did, that teens are old enough to cope.

“Adolescents are an unheard group,” says Shara Sosa, an oncology counselor at Life with Cancer, a support organization in Fairfax, Va.

Unfortunately, the nature of adolescence fights against openness of any kind, never mind the cancer in the family. With their kids locked behind a mask of teen indifference, parents “are often intimidated and don’t know how to talk to them,” Sosa says.

Teenagers are pulling away from the family, forging their own identity. The news that a parent has cancer yanks the adolescent back into the fold — exactly where the kid doesn’t want to be.

The reaction of a teen to a parent’s illness varies widely. Some respond with a disappearing act: after-school activities, mall excursions, sleepovers, you name it, they’ll do it to avoid the uncertain environment at home.

It doesn’t mean they don’t love and care about the parent with cancer — it’s just their way of dealing with it all, says Maureen Davey, a family therapy professor at the Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions.

Does that mean these kids are likely to turn to risky behavior? Mental health experts say there are no data to quantify this and emphasize that most of the teens they work with do not act out. Yet typical teen temptations are always present.

Of the 100-plus teens my daughter Maya and I interviewed for a book we wrote about teens and parental cancer, around 10 percent confessed that they’d turned to drinking, drugs or vandalism as coping mechanisms.

Elissa Bantug, who was 12 when her mom was given a diagnosis of breast cancer 21 years ago, felt as if her mother had abandoned her. The Potomac, Md., teen drank, hooked up with an older boyfriend and forged her mother’s name 36 times on notes to get out of school. When the school asked Mom to come in for a conference, the mother felt too exhausted from her cancer treatments to show up.

It’s impossible to say if Elissa would have acted out if her mom had been well. Still, looking back as an adult, Elissa says, “I felt like no one really talked to me.”

And she had lots of questions: Would her mom be OK? What does it mean to be a cancer survivor? How would their family life change in the short run and the long run? Her rebellion, she says, was sparked by a lack of information.

Other kids respond by defying their developmental stage, assuming responsibilities that normally fall to the parents. Out of sync with their peers, these kids sometimes talk about their real age and their “cancer age.”

“I’m 16, and I have to act like I’m 40,” a teen named Lyndsey told me. While her mother is in treatment for breast cancer, she says, “I have to cook, clean, make sure my mom eats, my brothers are fed.”

A “parentified” teen will inevitably feel frustrated. Teens may be “angry they have to take over everything and nobody appreciates that they’re doing so much more than they used to,” says psychiatrist Karen Weihs, medical director for supportive care at the University of Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson.

Stacy Hoover, a single mom in Spring Glen, Pa., learned she had breast cancer when her daughters were 13 years old and 18 months. She leaned on the older daughter, Megan Boyer, which took a toll.

No matter how the teen responds, the parents can help shape the child’s frame of mind. That means sharing information, regardless of whether the news is good or bad.

Medical psychologist Stacey Donofrio looked at nearly 300 adolescents in the Netherlands who were coping with a parent’s cancer. She found that “the intensity of the parent’s treatment” for illness was not as important in influencing adolescent reactions as the way parents talked to the kids about it: “Adolescents may feel especially uncertain if they feel their parents are not being entirely open.”

Such an information gap elevated the tensions for Jackie Shmauch, a Cleveland teen whose father had leukemia.

One night the 14-year-old fled her home in tears after eavesdropping on a call from her father’s oncologist. Jackie thought her father’s leukemia was in remission, but she overheard a discussion of a bone-marrow transplant.

After her parents found her at a friend’s house, they explained that the transplant was a preventive measure, not a sign the cancer was back. That’s when Jackie delivered her ultimatum: “If there is information you have and you think you shouldn’t tell Jackie, that’s what I want you to tell me.”

Yet not every teen is like Jackie. “If your child says, ‘Talking about this with you is not helpful to me,’ it’s important to respect that,” says child psychiatrist Paula Rauch, who directs the Marjorie E. Korff PACT Program (Parenting at a Challenging Time) at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

It is critical for parents to remember that, cancer or no cancer, they still need to keep an eye on their teens — no easy task, especially when one of the parents is ill.

The key, Sosa points out, is listening closely even though “your head is in so many different places” because of the cancer diagnosis. That means not just going “un-huh, un-huh,” but asking follow-up questions, even challenging your teen at times. If teens know you’re truly paying attention, she says, “they’re going to tell you all sorts of things.”

Some kids may just need a break from all the caregiving — perhaps by having other family members or friends shoulder the young person’s chores from time to time.

But cancer can provoke seemingly curious reactions, like a “no, thank you” to the offer of a day off. Some adolescents (and adults as well) “get so identified with this heroic caregiver role that they don’t want other people to step in,” says psychologist Barry J. Jacobs, author of “The Emotional Survival Guide for Caregivers: Looking After Yourself and Your Family While Caring for an Aging Parent.”

Lyndsey, the 16-year-old mentioned earlier, recently spent a week at Camp Kesem, a multisite summer program for kids facing a parent’s cancer. “(My mother) wanted me to get a break,” she said in an interview at a camp location near Charlottesville, Va. “I still kind of don’t want to be here, but I’m happy I came. It’s good to get a break — and to sleep a lot!”

A decade after her diagnosis, Marsha is in good health, but she and I are just beginning to understand how the experience affected our daughters.

Maya tells me how uneasy she was with her mother’s bald head, courtesy of chemo, and that she found relief from the free-floating cancer anxiety that infiltrated our home by turning to friends. And she’s sorry she didn’t help out more.

I, too, was sorry she didn’t step up. But I made the mistake of assuming that Maya and her sister could read my mind. I once exploded when my daughters didn’t rush to my aid as I dragged in bags of groceries after a day of errands.

“Can’t you give me a hand?” I yelled. Maya calmly said, “We’d be happy to if you’d ask us.”

Ÿ Silver is an editor at National Geographic and the author, with his daughter Maya, of “My Parent Has Cancer and It Really Sucks.”