Adolescent acting out when a parent has cancer

Abstract

The psychological stresses which cancer exerts on a family system can be immense, both situationally and developmentally. These stresses can be unusually intense for the adolescent who has a parent ill with cancer. They can impact upon the adolescent in overt ways, such as increased household or child care duties, or in more covert ways such as in subtle role shifts in the relationship between the adolescent and both the ill and the well parent. The covert role shifts are especially thought to promote acting out and potential decompensation on the part of the adolescent. The acting out can have system-defecting and sytem-unifying properties, with the decompensation secondary to unbearable role shifts that reintensify the adolescent emotional contact with parents in the midst of a developmental process of separation. General clinical intervention points are suggested to reduce the crisis and ameliorate the negative developmental potential.