Difficult Conversations: Telling Adolescents About a Parent's Life Limiting Illness and Death (RP412)

Abstract

•Describe two ways parents informed their adolescents of a parent's life limiting illness and death.•Identify one way healthcare professionals can assist families with disclosure. When a parent is diagnosed with a life limiting illness, one of the most difficult tasks facing the parents is informing their children. This study describes four ways in which parents disclose information about a parent's life limiting illness and death to their adolescent children. To explicate ways in which parents tell their adolescents about a parent's life limiting illness and death. Descriptive qualitative methods were used. Data were drawn from and 56 individual pre-death and 15 post death interviews with hospice patients, spouses and their adolescent children; all were part of a larger grounded theory study on strategies to help adolescents with a parent in hospice. The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were coded and analyzed using conventional content analysis techniques. Parents informed adolescents about a parent's life limiting illness and imminent death in ways that were intended to ease the adolescents' distress. The parents engaged in the process of disclosure in one of four ways: measured telling; skirted telling; matter-of-fact telling; inconsistent telling. The findings support a framework that describes the processes of disclosure of a parent's illness, imminent death and death to their adolescent children. Pre death findings about the ways the adolescents were informed were consistent with the post death findings.