Difficulties of Providing Help in a Crisis: Relationships Between Parents of Children with Cancer and Their Friends

Parents of children with cancer experience substantial stress over a long period of time. One way that parents cope with such stress is to seek social support from various sources, especially from close friends. Interviews with a sample of these parents, as well as with some of their close friends or informal “helpers,” illustrate the difficulties involved in both seeking and providing help in the midst of a crisis. Among the major difficulties parents and their close friends report are managing the emotional impact of the illness, intrusions into privacy or the prior boundaries of relationships, the creation of a stigma or an aura of “non‐normality,” finding methods for being useful and feeling effective, and dealing with sex‐role barriers to a full range of helping interactions. These difficulties are discussed and analyzed primarily in a qualitative framework; special attention is paid to deriving an understanding of their meaning from the actual experiences and reflections of parents and friends engaged in the helping process.