Family Communication

Parents of children diagnosed with complex chronic conditions (CCCs) face many challenges with managing their child's health. As parents are tasked with competing demands and the constant changes required to provide the best care possible for their child, talk about contradictions regarding their dual, and oftentimes competing, roles and responsibilities as both parent and caregiver is likely to occur.

Background: Understanding perceptions of family caregivers' roles and responsibilities regarding their child with complex cardiac needs has potential to help care teams better support parents. Paternal experience has been under-explored in pediatric cardiac cohorts.;

This integrative literature review examines the facilitators and barriers to open and clear parent-child communication in the context of childhood cancer (for this literature review, child refers to ages 0 to 19 years). The Resilience in Illness Model (Haase et al., 2017) was employed to organize the findings and link to resilience outcomes among children with cancer. In a search of three international databases (PubMed, CINAHL, and PsycINFO), 18 studies met inclusion criteria and were selected for review.

PURPOSE: To examine the family communication experience of Korean adolescents with cancer and their parents, including how adolescents and their parents verbally share feelings and concerns related to the adolescent's cancer diagnosis with one another, and how emotional communication affects parent-adolescent relationships and the family's coping abilities.

Background: The aging population in the United States is predicted to become one fifth of the population by 2050. With that increase, more individuals in the country will be experiencing chronic health conditions and the need for care, with end of life (EoL) becoming more of a topic that needs to be discussed. Objectives & Methods: This study aims to explore the ways adult children talk to their parents about EoL, death, and dying.

Family conflict and estrangement can complicate caregiving tasks later in life. Research suggests that adult children who are estranged do not visit their parents when their parents are sick, despite societal pressures to reconcile and take care of them. Parents also report feeling surprised that their estranged children did not return home when they were in need, which ultimately solidified the estrangement. This article offers a broad discussion of the existing research on family conflict and caregiving, then focuses more specifically on family estrangement. 

Previous research on healthcare technologies has shown how health tracking promotes desired behavior changes and effective health management. However, little is known about how the family caregivers' use of tracking technologies impacts the patient-caregiver relationship in the home. In this paper, we explore how health-tracking technologies could be designed to support family caregivers cope better with a depressed family member.