Telephone-Based Educational Intervention in Improving Communication Between Patients With Stage 0-III Cancer and Their Children

PRIMARY OBJECTIVES:

I. Test the feasibility of the recruitment and study protocol.

II. Evaluate the short-term impact of the program on the diagnosed parents' and the parent's
perceptions of their children's adjustment using a within group design (pre-posttest
design).

III. To compare outcomes from the telephone-delivered program with outcomes obtained from
the in-person program (between group design).

OUTLINE:

Participants complete the Enhancing Connections Telephone Program comprising 5, 1 hour
educational telephone sessions over 3 months. During session 1, parents receive help
defining the child's experience with the cancer as distinct from their own and ways to
manage their own cancer-related emotions so that they do not emotionally flood the child.
During session 2, parents receive assistance with developing skills to deeply listen and
attend to the child's thoughts and feelings, complementing the parent's tendency to be a
teacher, not a deep listener, of the child's thoughts, concerns, worries or understandings.
During session 3, parents receive additional communication and parenting skills enabling
them to initiate difficult cancer-related conversations and also interact with an upset
child or one who is not forthcoming. During session 4, parents receive help focusing on and
non-judgmentally interpreting the child's ways of coping with the cancer. It includes
exercises that assist the parent to relinquish negative assumptions about the child's
behavior related to the parent's cancer. Concurrently the session offers the ill parent ways
to elicit their child's report of what the parent can do to assist the child cope with the
child's cancer-related pressures. During session 5, parents focus on the gains they made in
prior sessions and what they have accomplished, in their own words, in parenting their child
about the cancer. The session also assists the ill parent to identify available resources
that can be used after program completion to maintain the parent's newly acquired gains from
the program.

Inclusion Criteria:

- Parents will be eligible if they have an initial diagnosis of non-metastatic cancer
of any type (stage 0-3), including melanoma, colorectal, cervical, leukemia, lymphoma
or breast cancer within the past 7 months

- Read and write English among their languages of choice

- Have ready access to a telephone

- Have a child 5-12 years old living at home who has been told their parent's cancer
diagnosis

- The child is living at home and does not have learning challenges

- No prior malignancy is allowed except for adequately treated basal (or squamous cell)
skin cancer