The Family Connections Program at Dana Farber Cancer Institute has a very comprehensive resource page for families parenting through cancer. Among other topics, this site tackles the issue of giving information about your diagnosis to your child’s school.
This seems to be one of those sensitive areas of communication. Does you child want his/her teacher to know? Do you want every member of the PTA and soccer team to know? Is there not one place where your child has the ability to escape your reality? Yet, where does your child spend a vast majority of his/her waking hours?Who might be in a better position to know when your child is struggling than the teacher? After all, chances are that the teacher doesn’t have chemo brain and isn’t tossing and turning through the night over medical procedures and the bills that follow.
Please check out the resource page at Dana Farber Family Connections for tips and hints about successfully communicating with the school and other helpful topics.